THE  AMERICAN  CREDO 


BY  H.  L.  MENCKEN  AND  GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN 

HELIOGABALUS :   A  BUFFOONERY 

BY  H.  L.  MENCKEN     BY  GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN 

THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  FRIEDRICH       ANOTHER  BOOK  ON  THE  THEATRE 
NIETZSCHE 

MR.  GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN 
A  BOOK  OF  BURLESQUES  PRESENTS 

IN  DEFENSE  OF  WOMEN  A  BOOK  WITHOUT  A  TITLE 

A  BOOK  OF  PREFACES  THE  POPULAR  THEATRE 

PREJUDICES:    FIRST  SERIES  COMEDIANS  ALL 


THE  AMERICAN  CREDO 

A  Contribution  Toward  the  Interpretation 
of  the  National  Mind 


BY 

GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN 
and  H.  L.  MENCKEN 


NEW  YORK 

ALFRED  •  A  •  KNOPF 
1920 


COPYRIGHT,  1920,  BY 
ALFRED  A.  KNOPF,  INC. 


PRINTED    IN    THE    UNITED    STATES   OP    AMERICA 


PREFACE 


The  superficial,  no  doubt,  will 
book  for  a  somewhat  laborious  attempt  at  jocos 
ity.  Because,  incidentally  to  its  main  purpose,  it 
unveils  occasional  ideas  of  so  inordinate  an  erron- 
eousness  that  they  verge  upon  the  ludicrous,  it  will 
be  set  down  a  piece  of  spoofing,  and  perhaps  de 
nounced  as  in  bad  taste.  But  all  the  while  that 
main  purpose  will  remain  clear  enough  to  the 
judicious.  It  is,  in  brief,  the  purpose  of  clarifying 
the  (a^renLfiXchange-of  dietoricdUgas-bombs  upon 
the^  subject  of  Ajnerjcan^ideals  and  the  American 
character,  so  copious,  so  cocksure  and  withal  so 
ill-informed  and  inconclusive,  by  putting  into  plain 
propositions  some  of  the  notions  that  lie  at  the 
heart  of  those  ideals  and  enter  into  the  very  sub 
stance  of  that  character.  "For  as  he  thinketh  in 
his  heart,"  said  Solomon,  "so  is  he."  It  is  a  say 
ing,  obviously,  that  one  may  easily  fill  with  fan- 

[7] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

tastic  meanings,  as  the  prevailing  gabble  of  the 
mental  healers,  New  Thoughters,  efficiency  engi 
neers,  professors  of  scientific  salesmanship  and 
other  such  mountebanks  demonstrates,  but  never 
theless  it  is  one  grounded,  at  bottom,  upon  an  in 
dubitable  fac);. ;  Deep  down  in  every  man  there 
is  a  body  of  congenital  attitudes,  a  corpus  of  in 
eradicable  'doctjines  and  ways  of  thinking,  that 
determines  his  reactions  to  his  ideational  environ 
ment  as  surely  as  his  physical  activity  is  determined 
by  the  length  of  his  tibice  and  the  capacity  of  his 
lungs.  These  primary  attitudes,  in  fact,  consti 
tute  the  essential  man.  It  is  by  recognition  of 
them  that  one  arrives  at  an  accurate  understanding 
of  his  place  and  function  as  a  member  of  human 
society;  it  is  by  a  shrewd  reckoning  and  balancing 
of  them,  one  against  another,  that  one  forecasts  his 
probable  behaviour  in  the  face  of  unaccustomed 
stimuli. 

All  the  arts  and  sciences  that  have  to  do  with 
the  management  of  men  in  the  mass  are  founded 
upon  a  proficient  practice  of  that  sort  of  reckon 
ing.  The  practical  politician,  as  every  connoisseur 
of  ochlocracy  knows,  is  not  a  man  who  seeks  to 
inoculate  the  innumerable  caravan  of  voters  with 

[8] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

new  ideas;  he  is  a  man  who  seeks  to  search  out  and 
prick  into  energy  the  basic  ideas  that  are  already 
in  them,  and  to  turn  the  resultant  effervescence  of 
emotion  to  his  own  uses.  And  so  with  the  religious 
teacher,  the  social  and  economic  reformer,  and 
every  other  variety  of  popular  educator,  down 
to  and  including  the  humblest  press-agent  of  a  fifth 
assistant  Secretary  of  State,  moving-picture  actor, 
or  Y.  M.  C.  A.  boob-squeezing  committee.  Such 
adept  professors  of  conviction  and  enthusiasm,  in 
the  true  sense,  never  actually  teach  anything  new; 
all  they  do  is  to  give  new  forms  to  beliefs  already 
in  being,  to  arrange  the  bits  of  glass,  onyx,  horn, 
ivory,  porphyry  and  corundum  in  the  mental  kal 
eidoscope  of  the  populace  into  novel  permutations. 
To  change  the  figure,  they  may  give  the  medulla 
oblongata,  the  cerebral  organ  of  the  great  masses 
of  simple  men,  a  powerful  diuretic  or  emetic,  but 
they  seldom,  if  ever,  add  anything  to  its  primary 
supply  of  fats,  proteids  and  carbohydrates. 

One  speaks  of  the  great  masses  of  simple  men, 
and  it  is  of  them,  of  course,  that  the  ensuing  treatise 
chiefly  has  to  say.  The  higher  and  more  delicately 
organized  tribes  and  sects  of  men  are  susceptible 
to  no  such  ready  anatomizing,  for  the  body  of  be- 

[9] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

liefs  upon  which  their  ratiocination  grounds  it 
self  is  not  fixed  but  changing,  and  not  artless  and 
crystal-clear  but  excessively  complex  and  obscure. 
It  is,  indeed,  the  chief  mark  of  a  man  emerged 
from  the  general  that  he  has  lost  most  of  his  orig 
inal  certainties,  and  is  full  of  a  scepticism  which 
plays  like  a  spray  of  acid  upon  all  the  ideas 
that  come  within  his  purview,  including  especially 
his  own.  One  does  not  become  surer  as  one  ad 
vances  in  knowledge,  but  less  sure.  No  article  of 
faith  is  proof  against  the  disintegrating  effects  of 
increasing  information;  one  might  almost  describe 
the  acquirement  of  knowledge  as  a  process  of  dis 
illusion.  But  among  the  humbler  ranks  of  men 
who  make  up  the  great  bulk  of  every  civilized  peo 
ple  the  increase  of  information  is  so  slow  and  so 
arduous  that  this  effect  is  scarcely  to  be  discerned. 
If,  in  the  course  of  long  years,  they  gradually  lose 
their  old  faiths,  it  is  only  to  fill  the  gaps  with  new 
faiths  that  restate  the  old  ones  in  new  terms.  Noth 
ing,  in  fact,  could  be  more  commonplace  than  the 
observation  that  the  crazes  which  periodically  rav 
age  the  proletariat  today  are,  in  the  main,  no  more 
than  distorted  echoes  of  delusions  cherished  cen 
turies  ago.  The  fundamental  religious  ideas  of  the 

[10] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

lower  orders  of  Christendom  have  not  changed  ma 
terially  in  two  thousand  years,  and  they  were  old 
when  they  were  first  borrowed  from  the  heathen  of 
northern  Africa  and  Asia  Minor.  The  Iowa  Meth 
odist  of  today,  imagining  him  competent  to  under 
stand  them  at  all,  would  be  able  to  accept  the  tenets 
of  Augustine  without  changing  more  than  a  few  ac 
cents  and  punctuation  marks.  Every  Sunday  his 
raucous  ecclesiastics  batter  his  ears  with  diluted 
and  debased  filches  from  De  Civitate  Dei,  and  al 
most  every  article  of  his  practical  ethics  may  be 
found  clearly  stated  in  the  eminent  bishop's  Ninety- 
third  Epistle.  And  so  in  politics.  The  Bolshevik! 
of  the  present  not  only  poll-parrot  the  balderdash  of 
the  French  demagogues  of  1789;  they  also  mouth 
what  was  gospel  to  every  bete  blonde  in  the  Teu 
tonic  forest  of  the  fifth  century.  Truth  shifts  and 
changes  like  a  cataract  of  diamonds;  its  aspect  is 
never  precisely  the  same  at  two  successive  instants. 
But  error  flows  down  the  channel  of  history  like 
some  great  stream  of  lava  or- infinitely  lethargic 
glacier.  It  is  the  one  relatively  fixed  thing  in  a 
world  of  chaos.  It  is,  perhaps,  the  one  thing  that 
gives  human  society  the  small  stability  that  it  needs, 
amid  all  the  oscillation  of  a  gelatinous  cosmos,  to 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

save  it  from  the  wreck  that  ever  menaces.  Without 
their  dreams  men  would  have  fallen  upon  and  de 
voured  one  another  long  ago — and  yet  every  dream 
is  an  illusion,  and  every  illusion  i?  a  lie. 

Nevertheless,  this  immutability  of  popular  ideas 
is  not  quite  perfect.  The  main  current,  no  doubt, 
goes  on  unbrokenly,  but  there  are  many  eddies 
along  the  edges  and  many  small  tempests  on  the 
surface.  Thus  the  aspect  changes,  if  not  the  sub 
stance.  What  men  believe  in  one  century  is  ap 
parently  abandoned  in  some  other  century,  and 
perhaps  supplanted  by  something  quite  to  the  con 
trary.  Or,  at  all  events,  to  the  contrary  in  ap 
pearance.  Off  goes  the  head  of  the  king,  and 
tyranny  gives  way  to  freedom.  The  change  seems 
abysmal.  Then,  bit  by  bit,  the  face  of  freedom 
hardens,  and  by  and  by  it  is  the  old  face  of  tyranny. 
Then  another  cycle,  and  another.  But  under  the 
play  of  all  these  opposites  there  is  something  fun 
damental  and  permanent — the  basic  delusion  that 
men  may  be  governed  and  yet  be  free.  It  is  only 
on  the  surface  that  there  are  transformations — 
and  these  we  must  study  and  make  the  most  of,  for 
of  what  is  underneath  men  are  mainly  unconscious. 
The  thing  that  colours  the  upper  levels  is  largely 
[12] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

the  instinctive  functioning  of  race  and  nationality, 
the  ineradicable  rivalry  of  tribe  and  tribe,  the  pri 
mary  struggle  for  existence.  At  bottom,  no  doubt, 
the  plain  men  of  the  whole  world  are  almost  in- 
distinguishably  alike;  a  learned  anthropologist, 
Prof.  Dr.  Boas,  has  written  a  book  to  prove  it. 
But,  collected  into  herds,  they  gather  delusions  that 
are  special  to  herds.  Beside  the  underlying  mass 
thinking  there  is  a  superimposed  group  thinking — 
a  sort  of  unintelligent  class  consciousness.  This 
we  may  prod  into.  This,  in  the  case  of  the  Homo 
americanus,  is  what  is  prodded  into  in  the  present 
work.  We  perform,  it  seems  to  us,  a  useful  pion 
eering.  Incomplete  though  our  data  may  be,  it  is 
at  least  grounded  upon  a  resolute  avoidance  of  a 
priori  methods,  an  absolutely  open-minded  effort  to 
get  at  the  facts.  We  pounce  upon  them  as  they 
bob  up,  convinced  that  even  the  most  inconsider 
able  of  them  may  have  its  profound  significance — 
that  the  essential  may  be  hidden  in  the  trivial.  All 
we  aim  at  is  a  first  marshalling  of  materials,  an 
initial  running  of  lines.  We  are  not  architects, 
but  furnishers  of  bricks,  nails  and  laths.  But  it 
is  our  hope  that  what  we  thus  rake  up  and  pile 
into  a  rough  heap  may  yet  serve  the  purposes  of 
[13] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

an  organizer,  and  so  help  toward  the  establish 
ment  of  the  dim  and  vacillating  truth,  and  rid  the 
scene  of,  at  all  events,  the  worst  and  most  obvious 
of  its  present  accumulation  of  errors. 


In  the  case  of  the  American  of  the  multitude  that 
accumulation  of  errors  is  of  astounding  bulk  and 
consequence.  His  ideas  are  not  only  grossly  mis 
apprehended  by  all  foreigners;  they  are  often  mis 
apprehended  by  his  own  countrymen  of  superior 
education,  and  even  by  himself. 

This  last,  at  first  blush,  may  seem  a  mere  effort 
at  paradox,  but  its  literal  truth  becomes  patent  on 
brief  inspection.  Ask  the  average  American  what 
is  the  salient  passion  in  his  emotional  armamen 
tarium — what  is  the  idea  that  lies  at  the  bottom 
of  all  his  other  ideas — and  it  is  very  probable  that, 
nine  times  out  of  ten,  he  will  nominate  his  hot  and 
unquenchable  rage  for  liberty.  He  regards  him 
self,  indeed,  as  the  chief  exponent  of  liberty  in 
the  whole  world,  and  all  its  other  advocates  as 
no  more  than  his  followers,  half  timorous  and  half 
envious.  To  question  his  ardour  is  to  insult  him 
as  grievously  as  if  one  questioned  the  honour  of 
[14] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

the  republic  or  the  chastity  of  his  wife.  And  yet 
it  must  be  plain  to  any  dispassionate  observer  that 
this  ardour,  in  the  course  of  a  century  and  a  half, 
has  lost  a  large  part  of  its  old  burning  reality 
and  descended  to  the  estate  of  a  mere  phosphores 
cent  superstition.  The  American  of  today,  in  fact, 
probably  enjoys  less  personal  liberty  than  any  other 
man  of  Christendom,  and  even  his  political  liberty 
is  fast  succumbing  to  the  new  dogma  that  certain 
theories  of  government  are  virtuous  and  lawful 
and  others  abhorrent  and  felonious.  Laws  limit 
ing  the  radius  of  his  free  activity  multiply  year 
by  year:  it  is  now  practically  impossible  for  him 
to  exhibit  anything  describable  as  genuine  indi 
viduality,  either  in  action  or  in  thought,  without  run 
ning  afoul  of  some  harsh  and  unintelligible  penalty. 
It  would  surprise  no  impartial  observer  if  the 
motto,  In  God  we  trust,  were  one  day  expunged 
from  the  coins  of  the  republic  by  the  Junkers  at 
Washington,  and  the  far  more  appropriate  word, 
Verboten,  substituted.  Nor  would  it  astound  any 
save  the  most  romantic  if,  at  the  same  time,  the 
goddess  of  liberty  were  taken  off  the  silver  dollars 
to  make  room  for  a  has  relief  of  a  policeman  in  a 
spiked  helmet. 

[15] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

Moreover,  this  gradual  (and,  of  late,  rapidly 
progressive)  decay  of  freedom  goes  almost  with 
out  challenge;  the  American  has  grown  so  accus 
tomed  to  the  denial  of  his  constitutional  rights  and 
to  the  minute  regulation  of  his  conduct  by  swarms 
of  spies,  letter-openers,  informers  and  agents  pro 
vocateurs  that  he  no  longer  makes  any  serious  pro 
test.  It  is  surely  a  significant  fact  that,  in  the 
face  of  the  late  almost  incredible  proceedings  un 
der  the  so-called  Espionage  Act  and  other  such 
laws,  the  only  objections  heard  of  came  either  from 
the  persons  directly  affected — nine-tenths  of  them 
Socialists,  pacifists,  or  citizens  accused  of  German 
sympathies,  and  hence  without  any  rights  whatever 
in  American  law  and  equity — or  from  a  small 
group  of  professional  libertarians,  chiefly  natural 
ized  aliens.  The  American  people,  as  a  people, 
acquiesced  docilely  in  all  these  tyrannies,  both 
during  the  war  and  after  the  war,  just  as  they 
acquiesced  in  the  invasion  of  their  common  rights 
by  the  Prohibition  Amendment.  Worse,  they  not 
only  acquiesced  docilely;  they  approved  actively; 
they  were  quite  as  hotly  against  the  few  protestants 
as  they  were  against  the  original  victims,  and  gave 
their  hearty  approbation  to  every  proposal  that 

[16] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

the  former  be  punished  too.  The  really  startling 
phenomenon  of  the  war,  indeed,  was  not  the  gro 
tesque  abolition  of  liberty  in  the  name  of  liberty, 
but  the  failure  of  that  usurpation  to  arouse  any 
thing  approaching  public  indignation.  It  is  im 
possible  to  imagine  the  men  of  Jackson's  army  or 
even  of  Grant's  army  submitting  to  any  such  ab 
solutism  without  a  furious  struggle,  but  in  these 
latter  days  it  is  viewed  with  the  utmost  compla 
cency.  The  descendants  of  the  Americans  who 
punished  John  Adams  so  melodramatically  for  the 
Alien  and  Seditions  Acts  of  1789  failed  to  raise  a 
voice  against  the  far  more  drastic  legislation  of 
1917.  What  is  more,  they  failed  to  raise  a  voice 
against  its  execution  upon  the  innocent  as  well  as 
upon  the  guilty,  in  gross  violation  of  the  most  ele 
mental  principles  of  justice  and  rules  of  law. 

Thus  the  Americano,  put  to  the  test,  gave  the 
lie  to  what  is  probably  his  proudest  boast,  and 
revealed  the  chronic  human  incapacity  for  ac 
curate  self-analysis.  But  if  he  thereby  misjudged 
and  misjudges  himself,  he  may  find  some  consola 
tion  for  his  error  in  the  lavishness  with  which  even 
worse  misjudgment  is  heaped  upon  him  by  for 
eigners.  To  this  day,  despite  the  intimate  contact 
[17] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

of  five  long  years  of  joint  war,  the  French  and  the 
English  are  ignorant  of  his  true  character,  and 
show  it  in  their  every  discussion  of  him,  partic 
ularly  when  they  discuss  him  in  camera.  It  is  the 
secret  but  general  view  of  the  French,  we  are  in 
formed  by  confidential  agents,  that  he  is  a  fellow 
of  loose  life  and  not  to  be  trusted  with  either  a 
wine-pot,  a  virgin  or  a  domestic  fowl — an  absurdly 
inaccurate  generalization  from  the  aberrations  of 
soldiers  in  a  far  land,  cut  off  from  the  moral  repres 
sions  that  lie  upon  them  and  colour  all  their  acts 
at  home.  It  is  the  view  of  the  English,  so  we  hear 
upon  equally  reliable  authority,  that  he  is  an  ear 
nest  but  extremely  inefficient  oaf,  incapable  of 
either  the  finer  technic  of  war  or  of  its  machine- 
like  discipline — another  thumping  error,  for  the 
American  is  actually  extraordinarily  adept  and 
ingenious  in  the  very  arts  that  modern  war  chiefly 
makes  use  of,  and  there  is,  since  the  revolt  of  the 
Prussian,  no  other  such  rigidly  regimented  man 
in  the  world.  He  has,  indeed,  reached  such  a  pass 
in  the  latter  department  that  it  has  become  almost 
impossible  for  him  to  think  of  himself  save  as  an 
obedient  member  of  some  vast,  powerful  and  unin 
telligibly  despotic  organization — a  church,  a  trades- 
[18] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

union,  a  political  party,  a  tin-pot  fraternal  order, 
or  what  not — ,  and  often  he  is  a  member  of  more 
than  one,  and  impartially  faithful  to  all.  More 
over,  as  we  have  seen,  he  lives  under  laws  which 
dictate  almost  every  detail  of  his  public  and  private 
conduct,  and  punish  every  sign  of  bad  discipline 
with  the  most  appalling  rigour;  and  these  laws  are 
enforced  by  police  who  supply  the  chance  gaps  in 
them  extempore,  and  exercise  that  authority  in 
the  best  manner  of  prison  guards,  animal  trainers 
and  drill  sergeants. 

The  English  and  the  French,  beside  these  spe 
cial  errors,  have  a  full  share  in  an  error  that  is 
also  embraced  by  practically  every  other  foreign 
people.  This  is  the  error  of  assuming,  almost  as 
an  axiom  beyond  question,  that  the  Americans  are 
a  sordid,  money-grubbing  people,  with  no  thought 
above  the  dollar.  You  will  find  it  prevailing  ev 
erywhere  on  the  Continent  of  Europe.  To  the  Ger 
man  the  United  States  is  Dollarica,  and  the  salient 
American  personality,  next  to  the  policeman  who 
takes  bribes  and  the  snuffling  moralist  in  office,  is 
the  Dollarprinzessin.  To  the  Italian  the  country 
is  a  sort  of  savage  wilderness  in  which  everything 
else,  from  religion  to  beauty  and  from  decent  re- 
[19] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

pose  to  human  life,  is  sacrificed  to  profit.  Italians 
cross  the  ocean  in  much  the  same  spirit  that  our 
runaway  school-boys  used  to  go  off  to  fight  the 
Indians.  Some,  lucky,  return  home  in  a  few  years 
with  fortunes  and  gaudy  tales;  others,  succumbing 
to  the  natives,  are  butchered  at  their  labour  and 
buried  beneath  the  cinders  of  hideous  and  God 
forsaken  mining  towns.  All  carry  the  thought  of 
escape  from  beginning  to  end;  every  Italian  hopes 
to  get  away  with  his  takings  as  soon  as  possible,  to 
enjoy  them  on  some  hillside  where  life  and  prop 
erty  are  reasonably  safe  from  greed.  So  with  the 
Russian,  the  Scandinavian,  the  Balkan  hillman, 
even  the  Greek  and  Armenian.  The  picture  of 
America  that  they  conjure  up  is  a  picture  of  a  ti 
tanic  and  merciless  struggle  for  gold,  with  the 
stakes  high  and  the  contestants  correspondingly 
ferocious.  They  see  the  American  as  one  to  whom 
nothing  under  the  sun  has  any  value  save  the  dol 
lar — not  truth,  or  beauty,  or  philosophical  ease,  or 
the  common  decencies  between  man  and  man. 

This  view,  of  course,  is  full  of  distortion  and 
misunderstanding,  despite  the  fact  that  even  Amer 
icans,  by  hearing  it  stated  so  often,  have  come  to 
allow  it  a  good  deal  of  soundness.     The  American's 
[20] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

concept  of  himself,  as  we  have  seen,  is  sometimes 
anything  but  accurate;  in  this  case  he  errs  almost 
as  greatly  as  when  he  venerates  himself  as  the 
prince  of  freemen,  with  gyveless  wrists  and  flash 
ing  eyes.  As  for  the  foreigner,  what  he  falls  into 
is  the  typically  Freudian  blunder  of  projecting 
his  own  worst  weakness  into  another.  The  fact  is 
that  it  is  he,  and  not  the  native  American,  who  is 
the  incorrigible  and  unimaginative  money-grubber. 
He  comes  to  the  United  States  in  search  of  money, 
and  in  search  of  money  alone,  and  pursuing  that 
single  purpose  without  deviation  he  makes  the  mis 
take  of  assuming  that  the  American  is  at  the  same 
business,  and  in  the  same  fanatical  manner.  From 
all  the  complex  and  colourful  life  of  the  country, 
save  only  the  one  enterprise  of  money-making,  he 
is  shut  off  almost  hermetically,  and  so  he  concludes 
that  that  one  enterprise  embraces  the  whole  show. 
Here  the  unreliable  promptings  of  his  sub-conscious 
passion  are  helped  out  by  observations  that  are 
more  logical.  Unfamiliar  with  the  language,  ex 
cluded  from  all  free  social  intercourse  with  the 
native,  and  regarded  as,  if  actually  human  at  all, 
then  at  least  a  distinctly  inferior  member  of  the 
species,  he  is  forced  into  the  harshest  and  most  ill- 
[21] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

paid  labour,  and  so  he  inevitably  sees  the  American 
as  a  pitiless  task-master  and  ascribes  the  exploita 
tion  he  is  made  a  victim  of  to  a  fabulous  exaggera 
tion  of  his  own  avarice. 

Moreover,  the  greater  success  and  higher  posi 
tion  of  the  native  seem  to  bear  out  this  notion. 
In  a  struggle  that  is  free  for  all  and  to  the  death, 
the  native  grabs  all  the  shiniest  stakes.  Ergo, 
he  must  love  money  even  more  than  the  immi 
grant.  This  logic  we  do  not  defend,  but  there  is 
— and  out  of  it  grows  the  prevailing  foreign 
view  of  America  and  the  Americans,  for  the  for 
eigner  who  stays  at  home  does  not  derive  his 
ideas  from  the  glittering,  lascivious  phrases  of  Dr. 
Wilson  or  from  the  passionate  idealism  of  such 
superior  Americans  as  Otto  H.  Kahn,  Adolph 
S.  Ochs,  S.  Stanwood  Menken,  Jacob  H.  Schiff, 
Marcus  Loew,  Henry  Morgenthau,  Abram  Elkus, 
Samuel  Goldfish,  Louis  D.  Brandeis,  Julius  Rosen- 
wald,  Paul  Warburg,  Judge  Otto  Rosalsky,  Adolph 
Zukor,  the  Hon.  Julius  Kahn,  Simon  Guggenheim, 
Stephen  S.  Wise  and  Barney  Baruch,  but  from  the 
hair-raising  tales  of  returned  "Americans,"  i.e., 
fellow  peasants  who,  having  braved  the  dragons, 
have  come  back  to  the  fatherland  to  enjoy  their 
booty  and  exhibit  their  wounds. 

[22] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

The  native,  as  we  say,  has  been  so  far  influenced 
by  this  error  that  he  cherishes  it  himself,  or,  more  > 
accurately,  entertains  it  with  shame.  Most  of  his 
windy  idealism  is  no  more  than  a  reaction  against 
it — an  evidence  of  an  effort  to  confute  it  and  live 
it  down.  He  is  never  more  sweetly  flattered  than 
when  some  politician  eager  for  votes  or  some 
evangelist  itching  for  a  good  plate  tells  him  that 
he  is  actually  a  soaring  altruist,  and  the  only  real 
one  in  the  world.  This  is  the  surest  way  to  fetch 
him;  he  never  fails  to  swell  out  his.  chest  when  he 
hears  that  buncombe.  In  point  of  fact,  of  course, 
he  is  no  more  an  altruist  than  any  other  healthy 
mammal.  His  ideals,  one  and  all,  are  grounded 
upon  self-interest,  or  upon  the  fear  that  is  at  the 
bottom  of  it;  his  benevolence  always  has  a  string 
tied  to  it;  he  could  no  more  formulate  a  course  of 
action  to  his  certain  disadvantage  than  an  English-  f 
man  could,  or  a  Frenchman,  or  an  Italian,  or  a 
German.  But  to  say  that  the  advantage  he  pur 
sues  is  always,  or  even  usually,  a  monetary  one — 
to  argue  that  he  is  avaricious,  or  even,  in  these  later 
years,  a  sharp  trader — is  to  spit  directly  into  the 
eye  of  the  truth.  There  is  probably,  indeed,  no 
country  in  the  world  in  which  mere  money  is  held 

[23] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

in  less  esteem  than  in  these  United  States.  Even 
more  than  the  Russian  Bolshevik  the  American 
democrat  regards  wealth  with  suspicion,  and  its  too 
eager  amassment  with  a  bilious  eye.  Here  alone, 
west  of  the  Dvina,  rich  men  are  ipso  facto  scoun 
drels  and  ferce  natures,  with  no  rights  that  any 
slanderer  is  bound  to  respect.  Here  alone,  the 
possession  of  a  fortune  puts  a  man  automatically 
upon  the  defensive,  and  exposes  him  to  special  leg 
islation  of  a  rough  and  inquisitorial  character  and 
to  the  special  animosity  of  judges,  district  attorneys 
and  juries.  It  would  be  a  literal  impossibility  for 
an  Englishman  worth  $100,000,000  to  avoid  pub 
lic  office  and  public  honour;  it  would  be  equally 
impossible  for  an  American  worth  $100,000,000 
to  obtain  either. 

Americans,  true  enough,  enjoy  an  average  of 
prosperity  that  is  above  that  witnessed  in  any  other 
country.  Their  land,  with  less  labour,  yields  a 
greater  usufruct  than  other  land;  they  get  more 
money  for  their  industry;  they  jingle  more  coin 
in  their  pockets  than  other  peoples.  But  it  is  a 
grievous  error  to  mistake  that  superior  opulence 
for  a  sign  of  money-hunger,  for  they  actually  hold 
money  very  lightly,  and  spend  a  great  deal  more 

[24] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

of  it  than  any  other  race  of  men  and  with  far  less 
thought  of  values.  The  normal  French  family,  it 
is  often  said,  could  live  very  comfortably  for  a 
week  upon  what  the  normal  American  family 
wastes  in  a  week.  There  is,  among  Americans, 
not  the  slightest  sign  of  the  unanimous  French  habit 
of  biting  every  franc,  of  calculating  the  cost  of 
every  luxury  to  five  places  of  decimals,  of  utilizing 
every  scrap,  of  sleeping  with  the  bankbook  under 
the  pillow.  Whatever  is  showy  gets  their  dollars, 
whether  they  need  it  or  not,  even  whether  they  can 
afford  it  or  not.  They  are,  so  to  speak,  constantly 
on  a  bust,  their  eyes  alert  for  chances  to  get  rid 
of  their  small  change. 

Consider,  for  example,  the  amazing  readiness 
with  which  they  succumb  to  the  imbecile  bait  of 
advertising!  An  American  manufacturer,  finding 
himself  with  a  stock  of  unsalable  goods  or  encount 
ering  otherwise  a  demand  that  is  less  than  his 
production,  does  not  have  to  look,  like  his  English 
or  German  colleague,  for  foreign  dumping  grounds. 
He  simply  packs  his  surplus  in  gaudy  packages, 
sends  for  an  advertising  agent,  joins  an  Honest- 
Advertising  club,  fills  the  newspapers  and  maga 
zines  with  lying  advertisements,  and  sits  down  in 
[25] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

peace  while  his  countrymen  fight  their  way  to  his 
counters.  That  they  will  come  is  almost  abso 
lutely  sure ;  no  matter  how  valueless  the  goods,  they 
will  leap  to  the  advertisements;  their  one  desire 
seems  to  be  to  get  rid  of  their  money.  As  a  con 
sequence  of  this  almost  pathological  eagerness,  the 
advertising  bill  of  the  American  people  is  greater 
than  that  of  all  other  peoples  taken  together. 
There  is  scarcely  an  article  within  the  range  of 
their  desires  that  does  not  carry  a  heavy  load  of  ad 
vertising;  they  actually  pay  out  millions  every  year 
to  be  sold  such  commonplace  necessities  as  sugar, 
towels,  collars,  lead-pencils  and  corn-meal.  The 
business  of  thus  bamboozling  them  and  picking 
their  pockets  enlists  thousands  and  thousands  of 
artists,  writers,  printers,  sign-painters  and  other 
such  parasites.  Their  towns  are  bedaubed  with 
chromatic  eye-sores  and  made  hideous  with  flash 
ing  lights;  their  countryside  is  polluted;  their  news 
papers  and  magazines  become  mere  advertising 
sheets;  idiotic  slogans  and  apothegms  are  invented 
to  enchant  them;  in  some  cities  they  are  actually 
taxed  to  advertise  the  local  makers  of  wooden  nut 
megs.  Multitudes  of  swindlers  are  naturally  in 
duced  to  adopt  advertising  as  a  trade,  and  some  of 

[26] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

them  make  great  fortunes  at  it.  Like  all  other 
men  who  live  by  their  wits,  they  regard  themeslves 
as  superior  fellows,  and  every  year  they  hold  great 
conventions,  bore  each  other  with  learned  papers 
upon  the  psychology  of  their  victims,  speak  of  one 
another  as  men  of  genius,  have  themselves  photo 
graphed  by  the  photographers  of  newspapers  eager 
to  curry  favour  with  them,  denounce  the  govern 
ment  for  not  spending  the  public  funds  for  adver 
tising,  and  summon  United  States  Senators,  eminent 
chautauquans  and  distinguished  vaudeville  stars  to 
entertain  them.  For  all  this  the  plain  people  pay 
the  bill,  and  never  a  protest  comes  out  of  them. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  only  genuinely  thrifty 
folks  among  us,  in  the  sense  that  a  Frenchman,  a 
Scot  or  an  Italian  is  thrifty,  are  the  immigrants  of 
the  most  recent  invasions.  That  is  why  they  oust 
the  native  wherever  the  two  come  into  contact — 
say  in  New  England  and  in  the  Middle  West. 
They  acquire,  bit  by  bit,  the  best  lands,  the  best 
stock,  the  best  barns,  not  because  they  have  the  se 
cret  of  making  more  money,  but  because  they  have 
the  resolution  to  spend  less.  As  soon  as 
they  become  thoroughly  Americanized  they  be 
gin  to  show  the  national  prodigality.  The  old 
[27] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

folks  wear  home-made  clothes  and  stick  to  the  farm; 
the  native-born  children  order  their  garments  from 
mail-order  tailors  and  expose  themselves  in  the 
chautauquas  and  at  the  great  orgies  of  Calvinism 
and  Wesleyanism.  The  old  folks  put  every  dollar 
they  can  wring  from  a  reluctant  environment  into 
real  property  or  the  banks;  the  young  folks  put 
their  inheritance  into  phonographs,  Fords,  boiled 
shirts,  yellow  shoes,  cuckoo  clocks,  lithographs  of 
the  current  mountebanks,  oil  stock,  automatic 
pianos  and  the  works  of  Harold  Bell  Wright,  Ger 
ald  Stanley  Lee  and  0.  Henry. 

in 

But  what,  then,  is  the  character  that  actually 
marks  the  American — that  is,  in  chief?  If  he  is 
not  the  exalted  monopolist  of  liberty  that  he  thinks 
he  is  nor  the  noble  altruist  and  idealist  he  slaps 
upon  the  chest  when  he  is  full  of  rhetoric,  nor  the 
degraded  dollar-chaser  of  European  legend,  then 
what  is  he?  We  offer  an  answer  in  all  humility, 
for  the  problem  is  complex  and  there  is  but  little 
illumination  of  it  in  the  literature;  nevertheless,  we 
offer  it  in  the  firm  conviction,  born  of  twenty  years' 
incessant  meditation,  that  it  is  substantially  correct. 
[28] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

It  is,  in  brief,  this:  that  the  thing  which  sets  off  the 
American  from  all  other  men,  and  gives  a  peculiar 
colour  not  only  to  the  pattern  of  his  daily  life  but 
also  to  the  play  of  his  inner  ideas,  is  what,  for 
want  of  a  more  exact  term,  may  be  called  social 
aspiration.  That  is  to  say,  his  dominant  passion 
is  a  passion  to  lift  himself  by  at  least  a  step  or  two 
in  the  society  that  he  is  a  part  of — a  passion  to  im 
prove  his  position,  to  break  down  some  shadowy 
barrier  of  caste,  to  achieve  the  countenance  of 
what,  for  all  his  talk  of  equality,  he  recognizes  and 
accepts  as  his  betters.  The^AmericaiL_is__a-pusher. 
His  eyes  are  ever  fixed  upon  some  round  of  the 
ladder  that  is  just  beyond  his  reach,  and  all  his 
secret  ambitions,  all  his  extraordinary  energies, 
group  themselves  about  the  yearning  to  grasp  it. 
Here  we  have  an  explanation  of  the  curious  rest 
lessness  that  educated  foreigners,  as  opposed  to 
mere  immigrants,  always  make  a  note  of  in  the 
country;  it  is  half  aspiration  and  half  impatience, 
with  overtones  of  dread  and  timorousness.  The 
American  is  violently- eager  -:to— get  on,  and  thor- 
oughly  convinced  jthat  Jhia.  .merits-  -entitb-lrim  to 
try  and  to  succeed,  but  by  the  same  token  he  is 
of  slipping  back,  and_ouJL_pf 
129]  " 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

the  second  fact,  as  we  shall  see,  spring  some  of  his 
most  characteristic  traits.  He  is  a  man  vexed,  at 
one  and  the  same  time,  by  delusions  of  grandeur 
and  an_iMejiority_cpmplex ;  he-JsJaoth^egolistical 
andjsubservient,  assertive  and  politic,  blatant  and 
sJiy/~Most  of  the  errors  about  him  are  made  by 
seeing  one  side  of  him  and  being  blind  to  the  other. 
Such  a  thing  as  a  secure  position  is  practically 
unknown  among  us.  There  is  no  American  who 
cannot  hope  to  lift  himself  another  notch  or  two,  if 
he  is  good;  there  is  absolutely  no  hard  and  fast 
impediment  to  his  progress.  But  neither  is  there 
any  American  who  doesn't  have  to  keep  on  fighting 
for  whatever  position  he  has;  no  wall  of  caste  is 
there  to  protect  him  if  he  slips.  One  observes 
every  day  the  movement  of  individuals,  families, 
whole  groups,  in  both  directions.  All  of  our  cities 
are  full  of  brummagem  aristocrats — aristocrats,  at 
all  events,  in  the  view  of  their  neighbours — whose 
grandfathers,  or  even  fathers,  were  day  labourers; 
and  working  for  them,  supported  by  them,  heavily 
patronized  by  them,  are  clerks  whose  grandfathers 
were  lords  of  the  soil.  The  older  societies  of  Eu 
rope,  as  every  one  knows,  protect  their  caste  lines 
a  great  deal  more  resolutely.  It  is  as  impossible 

[30] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

for  a  wealthy  pork  packer  or  company  promoter 
to  enter  the  noblesse  of  Austria,  even  today,  as  it 
would  be  for  him  to  enter  the  boudoir  of  a  queen; 
he  is  barred  out  absolutely  and  even  his  grand 
children  are  under  the  ban.  And  in  precisely  the 
same  way  it  is  as  impossible  for  a  count  of  the 
old  Holy  Roman  Empire  to  lose  caste  as  it  would 
be  for  the  Dalai  Lama;  he  may  sink  to  unutterable 
depths  within  his  order,  but  he  cannot  get  himself 
out  of  it,  nor  can  he  lose  the  peculiar  advantages 
that  go  with  membership;  he  is  still  a  Graf,  and, 
as  such,  above  the  herd.  Once,  in  a  Madrid  cafe, 
the  two  of  us  encountered  a  Spanish  marquis  who 
wore  celluloid  cuffs,  suffered  from  pediculosis  and 
had  been  drunk  for  sixteen  years.  Yet  he  re 
mained  a  marquis  in  good  standing,  and  all  lesser 
Spaniards,  including  Socialists,  envied  him  and 
deferred  to  him;  none  would  have  dreamed  of 
slapping  him  on  the  back.  Knowing  that  he  was 
quite  as  safe  within  his  ancient  order  as  a  dog 
among  the  canidce,  he  gave  no  thought  to  appear 
ances.  But  in  the  same  way  he  knew  that  he  had 
reached  his  limit — that  no  conceivable  effort  could 
lift  him  higher.  He  was  a  grandee  of  Spain  and 
that  was  all;  above  glimmered  royalty  and  the 
[31] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

hierarchy  of  the  saints,  and  both  royalty  and  the 
hierarchy  of  the  saints  were  as  much  beyond  him 
as  grandeeism  was  beyond  the  polite  and  well-edu 
cated  head- waiter  who  laved  him  with  ice- water, 
when  he  had  mania-a-potu. 

No_American  is  ever  so  securely  lodged.  There 
is  always  jomething  just  ahead  of  him,  beckoning 
himjami  tajitalizingjbim,  and  there  is  always  some 
thing  just  behind  him,  menacing  him  and  causing 
Jhim  fojweaT.  Even  when  he  attains  to  what  may 
seem  to  be  security,  that  security  is  very  fragile. 
The  English  soap-boiler,  brewer,  shyster  attorney 
or  stock-jobber,  once  he  has  got  into  the  House  of 
Lords,  is  reasonably  safe,  and  his  children  after 
him;  the  possession  of  a  peerage  connotes  a  definite 
rank,  and  it  is  as  permanent  as  anything  can  be 
in  this  world.  But  in  America  there  is  no  such 
harbour;  the  ship  is  eternally  at  sea.  Money  van 
ishes,  official  dignity  js  fQrgotten9_caste__lines_are 
as  full  of  gaps  as  an  ill-kept  hedge.  The  grand 
father  of  the  Vanderbilts  was  a  bounder;  the  last 
of  the  Washingtons  is  a  petty  employe  in  the  Li 
brary  of  Congress. 

It  is  this  constant  possibility  of  rising,  this  con 
stant  risk  of  falling,  that  gives  a  barbaric  j>ic- 
[32]    T 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

tucesgueness  to  the  panorama  of  what  is  called 
fashionable  society  in~America.  The  chief  jchar- 
actef  of  that  society  is~lo  be  found  in  its  shame- 
lessT  selPassertion,  itsjtlmost  obscene  display  of  its 
importance  and  of  the  shadowy  privileges  and  ac- 
cepfances~on  which  that  importance  is  based.  It 
is  assertive  for  the  simple  reason  that,  immediately 
it  ceased  to  be  assertive,  it  would  cease  to  exist. 
Structurally,  it  is  composed, Jjp  every  town  of  a 
nucleus  of  those  who  have  laboriously  arrived  and 
a  chaotic  mass  of  those  who  are  sjtraining  every 
effort  to  get  on.  The  effort  must  be  made  against 
great  od3s.  Those  who  have  arrived  are  eager  to 
keep  do  writhe  competitipn_of  newcomers;  on  their 
exclusiveness,  as  the  phrase  is,  rests  the  whole  of 
their  social  advantage.  Thus  the  candidate  from 
below,  before  horning  in  at  last,  must  put  up  with 
an  infinity  of  rebuff  and  humiliation;  he  .must 
sacrifice  his  self-respect  today  in  order  to  gain  the 
hope  of  destroying  the  self-respect  of  other  aspir 
ants  tomorrow.  The  result  is  that  the  whpje_  edi 
fice  is  based  upon,  fears  and  abasements,  and  that 
every  device  which  promises  to  protect  the  indi 
vidual  against  them  is  seized  upon  eagerly.  Fash 
ionable  society  in  America  therefore  has  no  room 
-  [33]  — 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

jor  intelligence;  within  its  fold  an  original  idea  is 
dangerous;  it  carries  regimentation,  in  dress,  in  so 
cial  customs  and  in  political  and  even  religious 
doctrines,  to  the  last  degree.  In  the  American 
cities  the  fashionable  man  or  woman  must  not 
only  maintain  the  decorum  seen  among  civilized 
folks  everywhere;  he  or  she  must  also  be  inter 
ested  in  precisely  the  right  sports,  theatrical  shows 
and  opera  singers,  show  the  right  political  creduli 
ties  and  indignations,  and  have  some  sort  of  con 
nection  with  the  right  church.  Nearly  always,  be 
cause  of  the  apeing  of  English  custom  that  pre 
vails  everywhere  in  America,  it  must  be  the  so- 
called  Protestant  Episcopal  Church,  a  sort  of  out 
house  of  the  Church  of  England,  with  ecclesiastics 
who  imitate  the  English  sacerdotal  manner  much 
as  small  boys  imitate  the  manner  of  eminent  base 
ball  players.  Every  fashionable  Protestant  Epis 
copal  congregation  in  the  land  is  full  of  ex-Bap- 
Tgts^an^S^Methodists  wlho  have  shed  Calvinism, 
total  immersion  and  the  hallelujah  hymns  on  their 
way  up  the.  ladder.  The  same  impulse  leads  the 
Jews,  whenever  the  possibility  of  invading  the  cita 
del  of  the  Christians  begins  to  bemuse  them  (as 
happened  during  the  late  war,  for  example,  when 
[34] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

patriotism  temporarily  adjourned  the  usual  taboos), 
to  embrace  Christian  Science — as  a  sort  of  half 
way  station,  so  to  speak,  more  medical  than  Chris 
tian,  and  hence  secure  against  ordinary  derisions. 
And  it  is  an  impulse  but  little  different  which  lies 
at  the  bottom  of  the  much-discussed  tide-hunt. 

A  title,  however  paltry,  is  of  genuine  social  value, 
more  especially  in  America;  it  represents  a  status 
that  cannot  be  changed  overnight  by  the  rise  of 
rivals,  or  by  personal  dereliction,  or  by  mere  ac 
cident.  It  is  a  policy  of  insurance  against  dangers 
that  are  not  to  be  countered  as  effectively  in  any 

other  manner.     Miss  G ,  the  daughter  of  an 

enormously  wealthy  scoundrel,  may  be  accepted 
everywhere,  but  all  the  while  she  is  insecure.  Her 
father  may  lose  his  fortune  tomorrow,  or  be  jailed 
by  newspaper  outcry,  or  marry  a  prostitute  and  so 
commit  social  suicide  himself  and  murder  his 
daughter,  or  she  herself  may  fall  a  victim  to  some 
rival's  superior  machinations,  or  stoop  to  fornica 
tion  of  some  forbidden  variety,  or  otherwise  get 
herself  under  the  ban.  But  once  she  is  a  duchess, 
she  is  safe.  No  catastrophe  short  of  divorce  can 
take  away  her  coronet,  and  even  divorce  will  leave 
the  purple  marks  of  it  upon  her  brow.  Most 
[35] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

valuable  boon  of  all,  she  is  now  free  to  be  herself, 
— a  rare,  rare  experience  for  an  American.  She 
may,  if  she  likes,  go  about  in  a  Mother  Hubbard,  or 
join  the  Seventh  Day  Adventists,  or  declare  for  the 
Bolsheviki,  or  wash  her  own  lingerie,  or  have  her 
hair  bobbed,  and  still  she  will  remain  a  duchess, 
and,  as  a  duchess,  irremovably  superior  to  the  gap 
ing  herd  of  her  political  equals. 

This  social  aspiration,  of  course,  is  most  vividly 
violent  and  idiotic  on  its  higher  and  more  gaudy 
levels,  but  it  is  scarcely  less  earnest  below.  Every 
American,  however  obscure,  has  formulated  within 
his  secret  recesses  some  concept  of  advancement, 
however  meagre;  if  he  doesn't  aspire  to  be  what  is 
called  fashionable,  then  he  at  least  aspires  to  lift 
himself  in  some  less  gorgeous  way.  There  is  not 
a  social  organization  in  this  land  of  innumerable 
associations  that  hasn't  its  waiting  list  of  candidates 
who  are  eager  to  get  in,  but  have  not  yet  demon 
strated  their  fitness  for  the  honour.  One  can 
scarcely  go  low  enough  to  find  that  pressure  absent. 
Even  the  tin-pot  fraternal  orders,  which  are  con 
stantly  cadging  for  members  and  seem  to  accept  any 
one  not  a  downright  felon,  are  exclusive  in  their 
[36] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

fantastic  way,  and  no  doubt  there  are  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  proud  American  freemen,  the  heirs  of 
Washington  and  Jefferson,  their  liberty  safe 
guarded  by  a  million  guns,  who  pine  in  secret  be 
cause  they  are  ineligible  to  membership  in  the 
Masons,  the  Odd  Fellows  or  even  the  Knights  of 
Pythias.  On  the  distaff  side,  the  thing  is  too 
obvious  to  need  exposition.  The  patriotic  societies 
amon&  women  are  all  machines  for  the  icsuscita- 
tion_of_lost  superiorities.  The  plutocracy  has 
shouldered  out  the  old  gentry  from  actual  social 
leadership — that  gentry,  indeed,  presents  a  prodi 
gious  clinical  picture  of  the  insecurity  of  social 
rank  in  America — but  there  remains  at  least  the 
possibility  of  insisting  upon  a  dignity  which  pluto 
crats  cannot  boast  and  may  not  even  buy.  ...Thus, 
the  county  judge's^  wife  in  Smithville  or  the 
Methodist  pastor's  daughter  in  Jonestown  consoles 
herself  for  the  lack  of  an  opera  box  with  the 
thought  (constantly  asserted  by__badge  and  resolu 
tion)  that  she  had  a  nobler  grandfather, j>r,  at  all 
events,  a  decenter  one,  than  the  Astors,  the  Van- 
derbilts  and  the  Goulds. 

[37] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

IV 

It  seems  to  us  that  the  genuine  characters  of  the 
normal  American,  the  characters  which  set  him  off 
most  saliently  from  the  men  of  other  nations,  are 
the  fruits  of  all  this  risk  of  and  capacity  for  change 
in  status  that  we  have  described,  and  of  the  dreads 
and  hesitations  that  go  therewith.  The  Ameri 
can  is  marked,  in  fact,  by  precisely  the  habits  of 
mind  and  act  that  one  would  look  for  in  a  man  in 
satiably  ambitious  and  yet  incurably  fearful,  to 
wit,  the  habits,  on  the  one  hand,  of  unpleasant 
assertiveness,  of  somewhat  boisterous  braggardism, 
of  incessant  pushing,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  of 
conformity,  caution  and  subservience.  He  is  for 
ever  talking  of  his  rights  as  if  he  stood  ready  to 
defend  them  with  his  last  drop  of  blood,  and  for 
ever  yielding  them  up  at  the  first  demand.  Under 
both  the  pretension  and  the  fact  is  the  common 
motive  of  fear — in  brief,  the  common  motive  of  the 
insecure  and  uncertain  man,  the  average  man,  at 
all  times  and  everywhere,  but  especially  the  motive 
of  the  average  man  in  a  social  system  so  crude  and 
unstable  as  ours. 

"More  than -a»y--other—  people,"  said  Wendell 
[38] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

Phillips  one  blue  day,  "we_Americans  are  afraid 
of  one  another."  The  saying  seems  harsh.  It 
goes  counter  to  the  national  delusion  of  uncompro 
mising  courage  and  limitless  truculence.  It  wars 
upon  the  national  vanity.  But  all  the  same  there 
is  truth  in  it.  Here,  more  than  anywhere  else  on 
earth,  the  status  of  an  individual  is  determined  by 
the  general  consent  of  the  general  body  of  his  fel 
lows;  here,  as  we  have  seen,  there  are  no  jjTtificial 
barriers  to  protect  him  agajnst  their  disapproval,  or 
even  a_gainst  their_envy.  And  here,  more  than  any 
where  else,  the  general  consent  of  that  general  body 
of  men  is  coloured  by  the  ideas  and  prejudices  of 
the  inferior  majority;  here,  there  is  the  nearest  ap 
proach  to  genuine  democracy,  the  most  direct  and 
accurate  response  to  mob  emotions.  Facing  that 
infinitely  powerful  but  inevitably  ignorant  and 
cruel  corpus  of  opinion,  the  individual  must  needs 
adopt  caution  and  fall  into  timorousness.  The  de 
sire  within  him  may  be  bold  and  forthright,  but  its 
satisfaction  demands  discretion,  prudence,  a  politic 
and  ingratiating  habit.  The  walls  are  not  to  be 
stormed ;  they  must  be  wooed  to  a  sort  of  Jerichoan 
fall.  Success  thus  takes  the  form  of  a  series  of 
waves  of  protective  colouration;  failure  is  a  sue- 

[39] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

cession  of  unmaskings.  The  aspirant  must  first 
learn  to  imitate  exactly  the  aspect  and  behaviour  of 
the  group  he  seeks  to  penetrate.  There  follows 
notice.  There  follows  toleration.  There  follows 
acceptance. 

Thus  the  hog-murderer's  wife  picks  her  way  into 
the  society  of  Chicago,  the  proud  aristocracy  of  the 
abbatoir.  And  thus,  no  less,  the  former  whiskey 
drummer  insinuates  himself  into  the  Elks,  and  the 
rising  retailer  wins  the  imprimatur  of  whole 
salers,  and  the  rich  peasant  becomes  a  planter  and 
the  father  of  doctors  of  philosophy,  and  the  servant 
girl  enters  the  movies  and  acquires  the  status  of  a 
princess  of  the  blood,  and  the  petty  attorney  be 
comes  a  legislator  and  statesman,  and  Schmidt 
turns  into  Smith,  and  the  newspaper  reporter  be 
comes  a  litterateur  on  the  staff  of  the  Saturday 
Evening  Post,  and  all  of  us  Yankees  creep  up,  up, 
up.  The  business  is  never  to  be  accomplished  by 
headlong  assault.  It  must  be  done  circumspectly, 
insidiously,  a  bit  apologetically,  pianissimo;  there 
must  be  no  flaunting  of  unusual  ideas,  no  bold 
prancing  of  an  unaccustomed  personality.  Above 
all,  it  must  be  done  without  exciting  fear,  lest  the 
portcullis  fall  and  the  whole  enterprise  go  to  pot. 

[40] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

Above   all,   the   manner   of   a   Jenkins   must   be 
got  into  it. 

That  manner,  of  course,  is  not  incompatible  with 
a  certain  superficial  boldness,  nor  even  with  an  ap 
pearance  of  truculence.  But  what  lies  beneath  the 
boldness  is  not  really  an  independent  spirit,  but 
merely  a  talent  for  crying  with  the  pack.  When 
tJie^American  is  most  dashingly  assertive  it  is  a  sure 
dgnjhaLhe  feela-the  packJiehind  him,  and  hears 
its  comforting  baying,  and  is  well  aware  that  his 
doctrine  is  approved.  He  is  not  a  joiner  for  noth 
ing.  Hejoins  something,  whether  it  be  a  political 
party,  a  church, _a^  fraternal  order  or  one  of  the 
idiotic  movements  that  incessantly  ravage  the  land, 
because  joining  gives  him  a  feeling  of  security, 
because  it  makesjiimjy3art  of  .something  large£  and 
safer  than  he  is  himself,  because  it  gives  him  a 
chance  to  work  off  steam  without  running  any  risk. 
The  whole  thinking  of  the  country  thus  runs  down 
the  channel^flnioF  emotion ;  there  isjaojicjual  con 
flict  of  ideas,  butj3nly_a_  succession  of  crazes.  Jt 
is  inconvenient  to  stand  aloof  from  these  crazes, 
and  it  is  dangerous  to  oppose  them.  In  no  other 
country  in  the  world  is  there  so  ferocious  a  short 
way  with  dissenters;  in  none  other  is  it  socially  so 
[41] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

costly  to  heed  the  inner  voice  and  to  be  one's  own 
man. 

Thus  encircled  by  taboos,  the  American  shows 
an  extraordinary  timorousness  in  all  his  dealings 
with  fundamentals,  and  the  fact  that  many  of  these 
taboos  are  self-imposed  only  adds  to  their  rigour. 
What  every  observant  foreigner  first  notices,  can 
vassing  the  intellectual  life  of  the  land,  is  the  shy 
and  gingery  manner  in  which  all  the  larger  prob 
lems  of  existence  are  dealt  with.  We  have,  for 
example,  positive  laws  which  make  it  practically 
impossible  to  discuss  the  sex  question  with  anything 
approaching  honesty.  The  literature  of  the  sub 
ject  is  enormous,  and  the  general  notion  of  its  im 
portance  is  thereby  made  manifest,  but  all  save  a 
very  small  part  of  that  literature  is  produced  by 
quacks  and  addressed  to  an  audience  that  is  afraid 
to  hear  the  truth.  So  in  politics.  Almost  alone 
among  the  civilized  nations  of  the  world,  the  United 
States  pursues  critics  of  the  dominant  political 
theory  with  mediaeval  ferocity,  condemning  them  to 
interminable  periods  in  prison,  proceeding  against 
them  by  clamour  and  perjury,  treating  them  worse 
than  common  blacklegs,  and  at  times  conniving  at 
their  actual  murder  by  the  police.  And  so,  above 

[42] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

all,  in  religion.  This  is  the  only  country  of 
Christendom  in  which  there  is  no  anti-clerical  party, 
and  hence  no  constant  and  effective  criticism  of 
clerical  pretension  and  corruption.  The  result  is 
that  all  of  the  churches  reach  out  for  tyranny 
among  us,  and  that  most  of  them  that  show  any 
numerical  strength  already  exercise  it.  In  half 
a  dozen  of  our  largest  cities  the  Catholic  Church  is 
actually  a  good  deal  more  powerful  than  it  is  in 
Spain,  or  even  in  Austria.  Its  acts  are  wholly 
above  public  discussion ;  it  makes  and  breaks  public 
officials;  it  holds  the  newspapers  in  terror;  it  in 
fluences  the  police  and  the  courts;  it  is  strong 
enough  to  destroy  and  silence  any  man  who  objects 
to  its  polity.  But  this  is  not  all.  The  Catholic 
Church,  at  worst,  is  an  organization  largely  devoted 
to  perfectly  legitimate  and  even  laudable  purposes, 
and  it  is  controlled  by  a  class  of  men  who  are 
largely  above  popular  passion,  and  intelligent 
enough  to  see  beyond  the  immediate  advantage. 
More  important  still,  its  international  character 
gives  it  a  detached  and  superior  point  of  view,  and 
so  makes  it  stand  aloof  from  some  of  the  common 
weaknesses  of  the  native  mob.  This  is  constantly 
revealed  by  its  opposition  to  Prohibition,  vice- 
[43] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

crusading  and  other  such  crazes  of  the  disinherited 
and  unhappy.  The  rank  and  file  of  its  members 
are  ignorant  and  emotional  and  are  thus  almost 
ideal  cannon-fodder  for  the  bogus  reformers  who 
operate  upon  the  proletariat,  but  they  are  held  back 
by  their  clergy,  to  whose  superior  interest  in  gen 
uine  religion  is  added  a  centuries-old  heritage  of 
worldly  wisdom.  Thus  the  Church  of  Rome,  in 
America  at  least,  is  a  civilizing  agency,  and  we  may 
well  overlook  its  cynical  alliance  with  political  cor 
ruption  in  view  of  its  steady  enmity  to  that  greater 
corruption  which  destroys  the  very  elements  of  lib 
erty,  peace  and  human  dignity.  It  may  be  a  bit 
too  intelligently  selfish  and  harshly  realistic,  but  it 
is  assuredly  not  swinish. 

This  adjective,  however,  fits  the  opposition  as 
snugly  as  a  coat  of  varnish — and  by  the  opposition 
we  mean  the  group  of  Protestant  churches  com 
monly  called  evangelical,  to  wit,  the  Methodist,  the 
Baptist,  the  Presbyterian  and  their  attendant  imita- 
tors  and  inferiors.  iLJ^^LjP-Ohii^J^011?  tnat 
the~dominating  religious  attitude  of  the  American 
people^  arises,  and,  in_pajrticula£,jir  is  from  this 
group  that  we  get  our  doctrine  jhat  religious  activity 
is  not  to  be  challenged,  however  flagrantly  it  may 
"  [44]- 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

stand  in  opposition  to  common  honesty  and  com 
mon  sense.  Under  cover  of  that  artificial  tolera 
tion — the  product,  not  of  a  genuine  liberalism,  but 
simply  of  a  mob  distrust  of  dissent — there  goes  on 
a  tyranny  that  it  would  be  difficult  to  match  in 
modern  history.  Save  in  a  few  large  cities,  every 
American  community  lies  under  a  sacerdotal 
despotTsih  whose  devices  are  disingenuous  jind  dis- 
honourableT  and  whqse_ppwer  was  magnificently 
displayed  in  the  campaign  for  Prohibition — a  des 
potism  exercised  by  a  body  of  ignorant,  supersti 
tious,  self-seeking  and  thoroughly  dishonest  men. 
f  One  may,  without  prejudice,  reasonably  defend  the 
/Catholic  clergV.)  Theysare  menVho,  at  ft<^rst,  pur- 
(  sue  an  intelligible  ideal  and  dignify  it  with  a  real 
\sacrifice.N)  But  ni^the  presence  of  the  Methodist 
clergy  if  is  difficult  tc^ayoid  giving  way  to  the  weak 
ness  of  indignation.  What  one  observes  is  a  horde 
of  uneducated  anH — inflammatory — dunderheads, 
eager jf or  power,  intolejcaiiL.ii£_QppojsitiQn,  and  full 
Q»f_^a-£hildish  -.vanity — a ,  mob~o£-holy~  derks~  irat 
little  raised,  in  intelligence^and-dignityy-^boveL  the 
forlorn  half-wits  whose  soul^heyjchronically  rack. 
In  the  wEole  "United  States  ihere  is  scarcely  one 
among  them  who  stands  jforthjis  a  man  of  sense  and 
"  [45]~ 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

information.  Illiterate  in  all  save  the  elementals, 
untouched^by  the  larger  jciirrents  of  thought,  drunk 
with  their  jo  wer_overdplts?  crazed  by  their  im 
munity  to  challenge  by  their  betters,  they  carry 
over  into  the  professional  class  of  the  country  the 
spirit_o£  iha-roost..stiipid  peasantry,  and  degrade 
reUgiOTMtor4e^tate_of_^jdiotic  phobia.  There 
is  not  a  village  in  America  in  which  some  such  pre 
posterous  jackass  is  not  in  eruption.  Worse,  he 
is  commonly  the  leader  of  its  opinion — its  pattern 
in  reason,  morals  and  good  taste.  Yet  worse,  he  is 
ruler  as  well  as  pattern.  Wrapped  in  his  sacer 
dotal  cloak,  he  stands  above  any  effective  criticism. 
To  question  -his-imbecile  -ideas -is-to- -stand  in  con- 
tnTTmcyLof  the.  rftvp.1a.tJQp  jif_CorL 

A  number  of  years  ago,  while  engaged  in 
journalism  in  a  large  American  city,  one  of  us 
violated  all  journalistic  precedents  by  printing  an 
article  denouncing  the  local  evangelical  clergy  as, 
with  few  exceptions,  a  pack  of  scoundrels,  and 
offered  in  proof  their  brisk  and  constant  trade  in 
contraband  marriages,  especially  the  marriages  of 
girls  under  the  age  of  consent.  He  showed  that  the 
offer  of  a  two  dollar  fee  was  sufficient  to  induce  the 
majority  of  these  ambassadors  of  Christ  to  marry 

[46] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

a  girl  of  fourteen  or  fifteen  to  a  boy  a  few  years 
older.  There  followed  a  great  outcry  from  the 
accused,  with  the  usual  demands  that  the  offending 
paper  print  a  retraction  and  discharge  the  guilty 
writer  from  its  staff.  He  thereupon  engaged  a 
clippmg  bureau  to  furnish  him  with  clippings  from 
the  newspapers  of  the  whole  country,  showing  the 
common  activities  of  the  evangelical  clergy  else 
where.  The  result  was  that  he  received  and  re 
printed  an  amazing  mass  of  putrid  scandal,  greatly 
to  the  joy  of  that  moral  community.  It  appeared 
that  these  eminent  Christian  leaders  were  steadily 
engaged,  North,  East,  South  and  West,  in  doings 
that  would  have  disgraced  so  many  ward  heelers  or 
oyster-shuckers — shady  financial  transactions,  gross 
sexual  irregularities,  all  sorts  of  minor  crimes. 
The  publication  of  this  evidence  from  day  to  day 
gave  the  chronicler  the  advantage  of  the  offensive, 
and  so  got  him  out  of  a  tight  place.  In  the  end,  as 
if  tickled  by  his  assault,  the  hierarchy  of  heaven 
came  to  his  aid.  That  is  to  say,  the  Lord  God 
Jehovah  arranged  it  that  one  of  the  leading 
Methodist  clergymen  of  the  city — in  fact,  the 
chronicler's  chief  opponent — should  be  taken  in  an 
unmentionable  sexual  perversion  at  the  head- 
[47] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

quarters  of  the  Young  Men's  Christian  Association, 
and  so  be  forced  to  leave  town  between  days.  This 
catastrophe,  as  we  say,  the  chronicler  ascribes  to 
divine  intervention.  It  was  entirely  unexpected; 
he  knew  that  the  fellow  was  a  liar  and  a  rogue,  but 
he  had  never  suspected  that  he  was  also  a  hog.  The 
episode  demoralized  the  defence  to  such  an  extent 
that  it  was  impossible,  in  decency,  to  go  on  with  the 
war.  The  chronicler  was  at  once,  in  fact,  forced 
into  hypocritical  efforts  to  prevent  the  fugitive 
ecclesiastic's  pursuit,  extradition,  trial  and  im 
prisonment,  and  these  efforts,  despite  their  disin 
genuous  character,  succeeded.  Under  another 
name,  he  now  preaches  Christ  and  Him  crucified  in 
the  far  West,  and  is,  we  daresay,  a  leading  advocate 
of  Prohibition,  vice-crusading  and  the  other  Meth 
odist  reforms. 

But  here  we  depart  from  the  point.  It  is  not 
that  an  eminent  Wesleyan  should  be  taken  in  crim. 
con.  with  a  member  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.;  it  is  that  the 
whole  Wesleyan  scheme  of  things,  despite  the  enor 
mous  multiplication  of  such  incidents,  should  still 
stand  above  all  direct  and  devastating  criticism  in 
America.  It  is  an  ignorant  and  dishonest  cult  of 
ignorant  and  dishonest  men,  and  yet  no  one  has 

[48] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

ever  had  at  it  from  the  front.  All  the  news 
paper  clippings  that  we  have  mentioned  were 
extraordinarily  discreet.  Every  offence  of  a 
clergyman  was  presented  as  if  it  were  an  isolated 
phenomenon,  and  of  no  general  significance;  there 
was  never  any  challenge  of  an  ecclesiastical  organ 
ization  which  bred  and  sheltered  such  men,  and 
carried  over  their  curious  ethics  into  its  social  and 
political  activities.  That  careful  avoidance  of  the 
main  issue  is  always  observable  in  These  States. 
Prohibition  was  saddled  upon  the  country,  against 
the  expressed  wish  of  at  least  two-thirds  of  the 
people,  by  the  political  chicanery  of  the  same  organ 
ization,  and  yet  no  one,  during  the  long  fight, 
thought  to  attack  it  directly;  to  have  done  so  would 
have  been  to  violate  the  taboo  described.  So  when 
the  returning  soldiers  began  to  reveal  the  astound 
ing  chicaneries  of  the  Young  Men's  Christian  As 
sociation;  it  was  marvelled  at  for  a  few  weeks,  as 
Americans  always  marvel  at  successful  pocket- 
squeezings,  but  no  one  sought  the  cause  in  the  char 
acter  of  the  pious  brethren  primarily  responsible. 
And  so,  again,  when  what  is  called  liberal  opinion 
began  to  revolt  against  the  foreign  politics  of  Dr. 
Wilson,  and  in  particular,  against  his  apparent  re- 

[49] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

pudiation  of  his  most  solemn  engagements,  arid  his 
complete  insensibility,  in  the  presence  of  a  moral 
passion,  to  the  most  elementary  principles  of  pri 
vate  and  public  honour.  A  thousand  critics, 
friendly  and  unfriendly,  sought  to  account  for  his 
amazing  shifts  and  evasions  on  unintelligible  logi 
cal  grounds,  but  no  one,  so  far  as  we  know,  ven 
tured  to  point  out  that  his  course  could  be  ac 
counted  for  in  every  detail,  and  without  any  maul 
ing  of  the  facts  whatsoever,  upon  the  simple  ground 
that  he  was  a  Presbyterian. 

We  sincerely  hpjpjejthat  no  L_qne_will  mistake  us 
here  for  anarchists  jyho  seek  to  hold  the  Presby 
terian  jsocta  of  ethics,_or_  the  Presbyterians  them 
selves,  up  to  derision.  We  confess  frankly  that, 
as  privateTn3ividualsrJwre  are~inclined-against  that 
code  and  that  all  our  prejudices  run  against  those 
who  subscribe  to  it  —  which  is  to  ^X'JJLl!16  direc- 

in  d  ealing,  .and  -even  of  a 


certain  jnild  snobbishness.  We  are  both-opposed  to 
moral^nthusiasm,  and  never  drink  with  a  moral 
man  if  it  can  be  avoided.  The  taboos  that  we  per 
sonally  subscribe  to  are  taboos  upon  the  very  things 
that  Presbyterians  hold  most  dear  —  for  example, 
moral  certainty,  the  proselyting  appetite,  and  what 

[50] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

may  be  described  as  the  passion  of  the  policeman. 
But  we  are  surely  not  fatuous  enough  to  cherish  our 
ideas  to  the  point  of  fondness.  Injhe_Jong  run, 
we  Jreely  grant,  j^majLturiL^PJiUhatjhe  Presby- 
terian&_are.  right  _and-we-ar£-  wrong — inJirieJLthat 
God  loves  a  moral  man_mo.r^_lhan--lie-4oves  an 
amiable  and  honourable  one^  Stranger  things,  in- 
deed^]Ka^^a^ejie^j_o^jmight  even  argue  with 
out  absurdity  that- Gad  is_  actually  -a  Presbyterian 
Himself.  Whether  He  is  or  is  notjve  do  not  pre 
sume  to  say;  we  simply  record  the  fact  that  it  is 
our  present  impression  that  He  is  not — and  then 
straightway  admit  that  our  view  is  worth  no  more 
than  that  of  any  other  pair  of  men. 

Meanwhile,  however,  it  is  certainly  not  going  too 
far  to  notice  the  circumstance  that  there  is  an 
irreconcilable  antithesis  between  the  two  sorts  of 
men  that  we  have  described — that  a  great  moral 
passion  is  fatal  to  the  gentler  and  more  caressing 
amenities  of  life,  and  vice  versa.  The  man  of 
morals  has  a  certain  character,  and  the  man  of 
honour  has  a  quite  different  character.  No  one 
not  an  idiot  fails  to  differentiate  between  the  two, 
or  to  order  his  intercourse  with  them  upon  an  as 
sumption  of  their  disparity.  What  we  know  in  the 

[51] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

United  States  as  a  Presbyterian  is  pre-eminently  of 
the  moral  type.  Perhaps  more  than  any  other  man 
among  us  he  regulates  his  life,  and  the  lives  of  all 
who  fall  under  his  influence,  upon  a  purely  moral 
plan.  In  the  main,  he  gets  the  principles  underly 
ing  that  plan  from  the  Old  Testament;  if  he  is  to 
be  described  succinctly,  it  is  as  one  who  carries 
over  into  modern  life,  with  its  superior  complexity 
of  sin,  the  simple  and  rigid  ethical  concepts  of  the 
ancient  Jews.  And  in  particular,  he  subscribes 
to  their  theory  that  it  is  virtuous  to  make  things  hot 
for  the  sinner,  by  which  word  he  designates  any 
person  whose  conduct  violates  the  ordinances  of 
God  as  he  himself  is  aware  of  them  and  interprets 
them.  Sin  is  to  the  Presbyterian  the  salient  phe 
nomenon  of  this  wobbling  and  nefarious  world,  and 
the  pursuit  and  chastisement  of  sinners  the  one 
avocation  that  is  permanently  worth  while.  The 
product  of  that  simple  doctrine  is  a  character  of  no 
little  vigour  and  austerity,  and  one  much  esteemed 
by  the  great  masses  of  men,  who  are  always  un 
easily  conscious  of  their  own  weakness  in  the  face 
of  temptation  and  thus  have  a  sneaking  veneration 
for  the  man  apparently  firm,  and  who  are  always 
ready  to  believe,  furthermore,  that  any  man  who 
[52] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

seems  to  be  having  a  pleasant  time  is  a  rascal  and 
deserving  of  the  fire. 

The  Presbyterian  likewise  harbours  this  latter 
suspicion.  More,  he  commonly  erects  it  into  a 
certainty.  Every  single  human  act,  he  holds,  must 
be  either  right  or  wrong — and  the  overwhelming 
majority  of  them  are  wrong.  He  knows  exactly 
what  these  wrong  ones  are;  he  recognizes  them  in 
stantly  and  infallibly,  by  a  sort  of  inspired  in 
tuition;  and  he  believes  that  they  should  all  be 
punished  automatically  and  with  the  utmost 
severity.  No  one  ever  heard  of  a  Presbyterian 
overlooking  a  fault,  or  pleading  for  mercy  for  the 
erring.  He  would  regard  such  an  act  as  the  weak 
ness  of  one  ridden  by  the  Devil.  From  such  harsh 
judgments  and  retributions,  it  must  be  added  in 
fairness,  he  does  not  except  himself.  He  detects 
his  own  aberration  almost  as  quickly  as  he  detects 
the  aberration  of  the  other  fellow,  and  though  he 
may  sometimes  seek — being,  after  all,  only  human 
— to  escape  its  consequences,  he  by  no  means  con 
dones  it.  Nothing,  indeed,  could  exceed  the  mental 
anguish  of  a  Presbyterian  who  has  been  betrayed, 
by  the  foul  arts  of  some  lascivious  wench,  into  any 
form  of  adultery,  or,  by  the  treason  of  his  senses 
[53] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

in  some  other  way,  into  a  voluptuous  yielding  to 
the  lure  of  the  other  beaux  arts.  It  has  been  our 
fortune,  at  various  times,  to  be  in  the  confidence 
of  Presbyterians  thus  seduced  from  their  native 
virtue,  and  we  bear  willing  testimony  to  their  sin 
cere  horror.  Even  the  least  pious  of  them  was  as 
greatly  shaken  up  by  what  to  us,  on  our  lower  plane, 
seemed  a  mere  peccadillo,  perhaps  in  bad  taste 
but  certainly  not  worth  getting  into  a  sweat  about, 
as  we  ourselves  would  have  been  by  a  gross  breach 
of  faith. 

But,  as  has  been  before  remarked,  the  bitter 
must  go  with  the  sweet.  In  the  face  of  so  ex 
alted  a  moral  passion  it  would  be  absurd  to  look  for 
that  urbane  habit  which  seeks  the  well-being  of 
one's  self  and  the  other  fellow,  not  in  exact 
obedience  to  harsh  statutes,  but  in  ease,  dignity  and 
the  more  delicate  sort  of  self-respect.  That  is  to 
say,  it  would  be  absurd  to  ask  a  thoroughly  moral 
man  to  be  also  a  man  of  honour.  The  two,  in  fact, 
are  eternal  enemies;  their  endless  struggle  achieves 
that  happy  mean  of  philosophies  which  we  call 
civilization.  The  man  of  morals  keeps  order  in 
the  world,  regimenting  its  lawless  hordes  and  organ 
izing  its  governments;  the  man  of  honour  mellows 

[54] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

and  embellishes  what  is  thus  achieved,  giving  to 
duty  the  aspect  of  a  privilege  and  making  human  in 
tercourse  a  thing  of  fine  faiths  and  understandings. 
We  trust  the  former  to  do  what  is  righteous;  we 
trust  the  latter  to  do  what  is  seemly.  It  is  seldom 
that  a  man  can  do  both.  The  man  of  honour  in 
evitably  exalts  the  punctilio  above  the  law  of  God; 
one  may  trust  him,  if  he  has  eaten  one's  salt,  to  re 
spect  one's  daughter  as  he  would  his  own,  but  if  he 
happens  to  be  under  no  such  special  obligation  it 
may  be  hazardous  to  trust  him  with  even  one's 
charwoman  or  one's  mother-in-law.  And  the  man 
of  morals,  confronted  by  a  moral  situation,  is 
usually  wholly  without  honour.  Put  him  on  the 
stand  to  testify  against  a  woman,  and  he  will  tell 
all  he  knows  about  her,  even  including  what  he  has 
learned  in  the  purple  privacy  of  her  boudoir. 
More,  he  will  not  tell  it  reluctantly,  shame-facedly, 
apologetically,  but  proudly  and  willingly,  in  re 
sponse  to  his  high  sense  of  moral  duty.  It  is 
simply  impossible  for  such  a  man  to  lie  like  a 
gentleman.  He  lies,  of  course,  like  all  of  us,  and 
perhaps  more  often  than  most  of  us  on  the  other 
side,  but  he  does  it,  not  to  protect  sinners  from  the 
moral  law,  but  to  make  their  punishment  under  the 

[55] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

moral  law  more  certain,  swift,  facile  and  spec 
tacular. 

By  this  long  route  we  get  at  our  apologia  for  Dr. 
Wilson,  a  man  from  whom  we  both  differ  in  politics, 
in  theology,  in  ethics  and  in  epistemology,  but  one 
whose  great  gifts,  particularly  for  moral  endeavour 
in  the  grand  manner,  excite  our  sincere  admiration. 
Both  his  foes  and  his  friends,  it  seems  to  us,  «do 
him  a  good  deal  of  injustice.  The  former,  carried 
away  by  that  sense  of  unlikeness  which  lies  at  the 
bottom  of  most  of  the  prejudices  of  uncritical  men, 
denounce  him  out  of  hand  because  he  is  not  as 
they  are.  A  good  many  of  these  foes,  of  course, 
are  not  actually  men  of  honour  themselves;  some 
of  them,  in  fact,  belong  to  sects  and  professions — 
for  example,  that  of  intellectual  Socialist  and  that 
of  member  of  Congress — in  which  no  authentic  man 
of  honour  could  imaginably  have  a  place.  But  it 
may  be  accurately  said  of  them,  nevertheless,  that 
if  actual  honour  is  not  in  them,  then  at  least  they 
have  something  of  the  manner  of  honour — that  they 
are  moving  in  the  direction  of  honour,  though  not 
yet  arrived.  Few  men,  indeed,  may  be  said  to  be 
long  certainly  and  irrevocably  in  either  category, 
that  of  the  men  of  honour  or  that  of  the  men  of 

[56] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

morals.  Dr.  Wilson,  perhaps,  is  one  such  man. 
He  is  as  palpably  and  exclusively  a  man  of  morals 
as,  say,  George  Washington  was  a  man  of  honour. 
He  is,  in  the  one  category,  a  great  beacon,  burning 
almost  blind ingly ;  he  is,  in  the  other,  no  more  than 
a  tallow  dip,  guttering  asthmatically.  But  the  ma 
jority  of  men  occupy  a  sort  of  twilight  zone,  and 
the  most  that  may  be  said  of  them  is  that  their  faces 
turn  this  way  or  that.  Such  is  the  case  with  Dr. 
Wilson's  chief  foes.  Their  eyes  are  upon  honour, 
as  upon  some  new  and  superlatively  sweet  enchant 
ment,  and,  bemused  to  starboard,  they  view  the 
scene  to  port  with  somewhat  extravagant  bilious 
ness.  Thus,  when  they  contemplate  His  Excel 
lency's  long  and  perhaps  unmatchable  series  of 
violations  of  his  troth— in  the  matter  of  "keeping 
us  out  of  the  war,"  in  the  matter  of  his  solemn  prom 
ises  to  China,  in  the  matter  of  his  statement  of  war 
aims  and  purposes,  in  the  matter  of  his  shifty  deal 
ing  with  the  Russian  question,  in  the  hiatter  of  his 
repudiation  of  the  armistice  terms  offered  to  the 
Germans,  in  the  matter  of  his  stupendous  lying  to 
the  Senate  committee  on  foreign  relations,  and  so 
on,  ad  infinitum — when  they  contemplate  all  that 
series  of  evasions,  dodgings,  hypocrisies,  double- 
[57] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

dealings  and  plain  mendacities,  they  succumb  to 
an  indignation  that  is  still  more  than  half  moral, 
and  denounce  him  bitterly  as  a  Pecksniff,  a  Tar- 
tuffe  and  a  Pinto.  In  that  judgment,  as  we  shall 
show,  there  is  naught  save  a  stupid  incapacity  to 
understand  an  unlike  man — in  brief,  no  more  than 
the  dunderheadedness  which  makes  a  German  re 
gard  every  Englishman  as  a  snuffling  poltroon,  hid 
ing  behind  his  vassals,  and  causes  an  Englishman 
to  look  upon  every  German  as  a  fiend  in  human 
form,  up  to  his  hips  in  blood. 

But  one  expects  a  man's  foes  to  misjudge  him, 
and  even  to  libel  him  deliberately;  a  good  deal  of 
their  enmity,  in  fact,  is  often  no  more  than  a  product 
of  their  uneasy  consciousness  that  they  have  dealt 
unfairly  with  him;  one  is  always  most  bitter,  not 
toward  the  author  of  one's  wrongs,  but  toward  the 
victim  of  one's  wrongs.  Unluckily,  Dr.  Wilson's 
friends  have  had  at  him  even  more  cruelly. 
When,  seeking  to  defend  what  they  regard  as  his 
honour,  they  account  for  his  incessant  violation  of 
his  pledges — to  the  voters  in  1916,  to  the  soldiers 
drafted  for  the  war,  to  the  Chinese  on  their  en 
trance,  to  the  Austrians  when  he  sought  to  get  them 
out,  to  the  Germans  when  he  offered  them  his  four- 
[58] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

teen  points,  to  the  country  in  the  matter  of  secret 
diplomacy — when  his  friends  attempt  to  explain  his 
cavalier  repudiation  of  all  these  pledges  on  the 
ground  that  he  could  not  have  kept  them  without 
violating  later  pledges,  they  achieve,  of  course,  only 
an  imbecility,  obvious  and  damning,  for  it  must  be 
plain  that  no  man  is  permitted,  in  honour,  to  make 
antagonistic  engagements,  or  to  urge  his  private 
tranquillity  or  even  the  public  welfare  as  an  excuse 
for  changing  their  terms  without  the  consent  of  the 
parties  of  the  second  part.  A  man  of  honour  is 
one  who  simply  does  whatever  he  says  he  will  do, 
provided  the  other  party  holds  to  the  compact  too. 
One  cannot  imagine  him  shifting,  trimming  and 
making  excuses;  it  is  his  peculiar  mark  that  he 
never  makes  excuses — that  the  need  of  making  them 
would  fill  him  with  unbearable  humiliation.  The 
moment  a  man  of  honour  faces  the  question  of  his 
honour,  he  is  done  for;  it  can  no  more  stand  in 
vestigation  than  the  chastity  of  a  woman  can  stand 
investigation.  In  such  a  character,  Dr.  Wilson 
would  have  been  bound  irrevocably  by  all  his  long 
series  of  solemn  engagements,  from  the  first  to  the 
last,  without  the  slightest  possibility  of  dotting  an  i 
or  of  cutting  off  the  tail  of  a  comma.  It  would  have 
[59] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

been  as  impossible  for  him  to  have  repudiated  a 
single  one  of  them  at  the  desire  of  his  friends  or  in 
the  interest  of  his  idealistic  enterprises  as  it  would 
have  been  for  him  to  have  repudiated  it  to  his  own 
private  profit. 

But  here  is  where  both  foes  and  friends  go 
aground;  both  attempt  to  inject  concepts  of  honour 
into  transactions  predominatingly,  and  perhaps  ex 
clusively,  coloured  by  concepts  of  morals.  The 
two  things  are  quite  distinct,  as  the  two  sorts  of 
men  are  quite  distinct.  Beside  the  obligation  of 
honour  there  is  the  obligation  of  morals,  entirely 
independent  and  often  directly  antagonistic.  And 
beside  the  man  who  yields  to  the  punctilio — the 
man  of  honour,  the  man  who  keeps  his  word — there 
is  the  man  who  submits  himself,  regardless  of  his 
personal  engagements  and  the  penalties  that  go 
therewith,  to  the  clarion  call  of  the  moral  law. 
Dr.  Wilson  is  such  a  man.  He  is,  as  has  been  re 
marked,  a  Presbyterian,  a  Calvinist,  a  militant 
moralist.  In  that  role,  devoted  to  that  high  cause, 
clad  in  that  white  garment,  he  was  purged  of  all 
obligations  of  honour  to  any  merely  earthly  power. 
His  one  obligation  was  to  the  moral  law — in  brief, 
to  the  ordinance  of  God,  as  determined  by  Chris- 

[60] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

tian  pastors.  Under  that  moral  law,  specifically, 
he  was  charged  to  search  out  and  determine  its  vio 
lations  by  the  accused  in  the  dock,  to  wit,  by  the 
German  nation,  according  to  the  teaching  of  those 
pastors  and  the  light  within,  and  to  fix  and  exe 
cute  a  punishment  that  should  be  swift,  terrible  and 
overwhelming. 

To  this  business,  it  must  be  granted  by  even  his 
most  extravagant  opponents,  he  addressed  himself 
with  the  loftiest  resolution  and  singleness  of  pur 
pose,  excluding  all  puerile  questions  of  ways  and 
means.  He  was,  by  the  moral  law,  no  more  bound 
to  take  into  account  the  process  whereby  the  ac 
cused  was  brought  to  book  and  the  weight  of  retri 
bution  brought  to  bear  than  a  detective  is  bound  to 
remember  how  any  ordinary  prisoner  is  snared  for 
the  mill  of  justice.  The  detective  himself  may 
have  been  an  important  factor  in  that  process;  he 
may  have  taken  the  prisoner  by  some  stratagem  in 
volving  the  most  gross  false  pretences;  he  may  have 
even  played  the  agent  provocateur  and  so  actually 
suggested,  planned  and  supervised  the  crime.  But 
surely  that  would  be  a  ridiculous  critic  who  would 
argue  thereby  that  the  detective  should  forthwith 
forget  the  law  violated  and  the  punishment  justly 
[61] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

provided  for  it,  and  go  over  to  the  side  of  the  de 
fence  on  the  ground  that  his  dealings  with  the 
prisoner  involved  him  in  obligations  of  honour. 
The  world  would  laugh  at  such  a  moral  moron,  if  it 
did  not  actually  destroy  him  as  an  enemy  of  so 
ciety.  It  recognizes  the  two  codes  that  we  have 
described,  and  it  knows  that  they  are  antagonistic. 
It  expects  a  man  sworn  to  the  service  of  morality 
to  discharge  his  duty  at  any  cost  to  his  honour,  just 
as  it  expects  a  man  publicly  devoted  to  honour  to 
keep  his  word  at  any  cost  to  his  or  to  the  public 
morals.  Moreover,  it  inclines,  when  there  is  a 
conflict,  toward  the  side  of  morals;  the  overwhelm 
ing  majority  of  men  are  men  of  morals,  not  men 
of  honour.  They  believe  that  it  is  vastly  more  im 
portant  that  the  guilty  should  be  detected,  taken 
into  custody  and  exposed  to  the  rigour  of  the  law 
than  that  the  honour  of  this  or  that  man  should  be 
preserved.  In  truth,  there  are  frequent  circum 
stances  under  which  they  positively  esteem  a  man 
who  thus  sacrifices  his  honour,  or  even  their  own 
honour.  The  man  of  dishonour  may  actually  take 
on  the  character  of  a  public  hero.  Thus,  in  1903, 
when  the  late  Major  General  Roosevelt,  then  Presi 
dent,  tore  up  the  treaty  of  1846,  whereby  the  United 

[62] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

States  guaranteed  the  sovereignty  of  Columbia  in 
the  Isthmus  of  Panama,  the  great  masses  of  the 
American  plain  people  not  only  at  once  condoned 
this  grave  breach  of  honour,  but  actually  applauded 
Dr.  Roosevelt  because  his  act  furthered  the  great 
moral  enterprise  of  digging  the  canal. 

These  distinctions,  of  course,  are  familiar  to  all 
men  who  devote  themselves  to  the  study  of  the 
human  psyche;  that  morals  and  honour  are  not  one 
and  the  same  thing,  but  two  very  distinct  and  even 
antithetical  things,  is  surely  no  news  to  the  ju 
dicious.  But  what  is  thus  merely  an  axiom  of 
ethics,  politics  or  psychology  is  often  kept  strangely 
secret  in  the  United  States.  We  have  acquired  the 
habit  of  evading  all  the  facts  of  life  save  those  that 
are  most  superficial;  by  long  disuse  we  have  almost 
lost  the  capacity  for  thinking  analytically  and  ac 
curately.  A  thing  may  be  universally  known 
among  us,  and  yet  never  get  itself  so  much  as  men 
tioned.  Around  scores  of  elementary  platitudes 
there  hangs  a  shuddering  silence  as  complete  as  that 
which  hedges  in  the  sacred  name  of  a  Polynesian 
chief.  At  every  election  time,  in  our  large  cities, 
most  of  the  fundamental  issues  are  concealed,  par 
ticularly  when  they  happen  to  take  on  a  theological 
[63] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

colour,  which  is  very  often.  It  is,  for  example, 
the  timorous  public  theory,  born  of  this  fear  of  the 
forthright  fact,  that  when  a  man  sets  up  as  a  candi 
date  for,  say,  a  judgeship,  the  question  of  his  priv 
ate  religious  faith  is  of  no  practical  importance — 
that  it  makes  no  difference  whether  he  is  a  Catholic 
or  a  Methodist.  The  truth  is,  of  course,  that  his 
faith  is  often  of  the  very  first  importance — that 
it  will  colour  his  conduct  of  the  forensic  combats  be 
fore  him  even  more  than  his  politics,  his  capacity 
to  digest  proteids  or  the  social  aspirations  of  his 
wife.  One  constantly  notes,  in  American  jurispru 
dence,  the  effects  of  theological  prejudices  on  the 
bench;  there  are  at  least  a  dozen  controlling  de 
cisions,  covering  especially  the  new  moral  legisla 
tion,  which  might  almost  be  mistaken  by  a  layman 
for  sermons  by  the  Rev.  Dr.  Billy  Sunday.  The 
Prohibitionists,  during  their  long  and  very  adroit 
campaign,  shrewdly  recognized  the  importance  of 
controlling  the  judiciary;  in  particular,  they  threw 
all  their  power  against  the  election  of  candidates 
who  were  known  to  be  Catholics,  or  Jews,  or  free 
thinkers.  As  a  result  they  packed  the  bench  of 
nearly  every  state  with  Methodist,  Baptist  and  Pres 
byterian  judges,  and  these  gentlemen  at  once  up- 

[64] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

held  all  their  maze  of  outrageous  statutes.  That 
they  would  do  so  if  elected  was  known  in  advance, 
and  yet,  so  far  as  the  record  shows,  it  was  a  rare 
thing  for  any  one  to  attack  them  on  the  ground  of 
their  religion,  and  rarer  still  for  any  such  attack 
to  influence  many  votes.  The  taboo  was  working. 
The  majority  of  voters  were  eager  to  avoid  that 
issue.  They  felt,  in  some  vague  and  unintelligible 
way,  that  it  was  improper  to  raise  it. 

So  with  all  other  primary  issues.  There  is 
surely  no  country  in  the  world  in  which  the  mar 
riage  relation  is  discussed  more  copiously  than  in 
the  United  States,  and  yet  there  is  no  country  in 
which  its  essentials  are  more  diligently  avoided. 
Some  years  ago,  seeking  to  let  some  sagacity  into 
the  prevailing  exchange  of  platitudes,  one  of  us 
wrote  a  book  upon  the  subject,  grounding  it  upon 
the  obvious  doctrine  that  women  have  much  more 
to  gain  by  marriage  than  men,  and  that  the  major 
ity  of  men  are  aware  of  it,  and  would  never  marry  3 
at  alHf  it  were  not  for  women's  relentless  effort  to  f 
bring  them  to  it.  ~This  banality  the  writer  sup 
ported,  by  dint  of  great  painstaking,  in  a  somewhat 
novel  way.  That  is  to  say,  he  put  upon  himself  the 
limitation  of  employing  no  theory,  statement  of  fact 
[65] 


THE    AMERICAN    CREDO 

or  argument  in  the  book  that  was  not  already  em 
bodied  in  a  common  proverb  in  some  civilized  lan 
guage.  Now  and  then  it  was  a  bit  hard  to  find  the 
proverb,  but  in  most  cases  it  was  very  easy,  and  in 
some  cases  he  found,  not  one,  but  dozens.  Well, 
this  laborious  pastiche  of  the  obvious  made  such  a 
sensation  that  it  sold  better  than  any  other  book  that 
the  author  had  ever  written — and  the  reviews  unani 
mously  described  it,  either  with  praise  or  with 
blame,  as  an  extraordinary  collection  of  heresies, 
\  most  of  them  almost  too  acrid  to  be  bruited  about. 
\In  other  words,  this  mass  of  platitudes  took  Ameri 
cans  by  surprise,  and  somehow  shocked  them. 
iWhat  was  commonplace  to  even  the  peasants  of  the 
European  Continent  was  so  unfamiliar  to  even  the 
|  literate  minority  over  here  that  the  book  acquired  a 
sort  of  sinister  repute,  and  the  writer  himself  came 
to  be  discussed  as  a  fellow  with  the  habit  of  arising 
in  decorous  society  and  indelicately  blowing  his 
nose. 

There  is,  of  course,  something  of  the  same  shrink 
ing  from  the  elemental  facts  of  life  in  England;  it 
seems  to  run  with  the  Anglo-Saxon.  This  accounts 
for  the  shuddering  attitude  of  the  English  to  such 
platitude-monging  foreigners  as  George  Bernard 

[66] 


THE    AMERICAN    CREDO 

Shaw,  the  Scotsman  disguised  as  an  Irishman,  and 
G.  K.  Chesterton,  who  shows  all  the  physical  and 
mental  stigmata  of  a  Bavarian.  Shaw's  plays, 
which  once  had  all  England  by  the  ears,  were  set 
down  as  compendiums  of  the  self-evident  by  the 
French,  a  realistic  and  plain-spoken  people,  and 
were  sniffed  at  in  Germany  by  all  save  the  middle 
classes,  who  correspond  to  the  intelligentsia  of 
Anglo-Saxondom.  But  in  America,  even  more  than 
in  England,  they  were  viewed  as  genuinely  satanic. 
We  shall  never  forget,  indeed,  the  tremulous  man 
ner  in  which  American  audiences  first  listened  to 
the  feeble  rattling  of  the  palpable  in  such  pieces  as 
"Man  and  Superman"  and  "You  Never  Can  Tell." 
It  was  precisely  the  manner  of  an  old  maid  devour 
ing  "What  Every  Girl  of  Forty-Five  Should  Know" 
behind  the  door.  As  for  Chesterton,  his  banal  ar 
guments  in  favour  of  alcohol  shocked  the  country 
so  greatly  that  his  previous  high  services  to  relig 
ious  superstition  were  forgotten,  and  today  he  is 
seldom  mentioned  by  respectable  Americans. 


It  is  necessary  to  repeat  that  we  rehearse  all  these 
facts,  not  in  indignation,  nor  indeed  in  any  spirit 
[67] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

of  carping  whatever,  but  in  perfect  serenity  and 
simply  as  descriptive  sociologists.  This  attitude  of 
mind  is  but  little  comprehended  in  America,  where 
the  emotions  dominate  all  human  reactions,  and 
even  such  dismal  sciences  as  paleontology,  pathol 
ogy  and  comparative  philology  are  gaudily  col 
oured  by  patriotic  and  other  passions.  Thejtypi- 
cal  American  learned  man  suffers ;_ horribly  from 
the  national  o^ajej_he_is_eterrially .afraid- of  some- 
thing.  If  it  is  not  that  some  cheese-monger  among 
his  trustees  will  have  him  cashiered  for  receiving  a 
picture  post-card  frolrrPfof.  Dr.  Scott  Nearing,  it 
is  that  solrie~sweating^nd~Bcoundrelly  German  or 
Frenchmari^jvil^  discover  and  denounce  his  cribs, 
and  i£Jt-is__notjhat  the  foreigner  will  have_at  Elm, 
it  is  that  he^  will  be  robbed  of  his  step  from  asso 
ciate  Jo_full  professor  by  some  rival  whose  wife 
is  more  amiable ^to^the  ^esi3ent_oj^he  university, 
or  who  is  himself  jnore  popular  with  the  college 
Athletes.  Thus  surrounded  by  j^ears,  he  translates 
them,  by  ^-familiar  psychological  process,  into  in 
dignations.  He  armounces  what  he^has  to  say  in 
terms  of  raucous  dudgeon,  .as. a. _negro,  having  to 
go  past  a  medical  collegejit  night^  intones  some  bel 
licose  gospel-hymn.  He  is,  in  brief,  vociferously 

[68] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

correct.  During  the  late  war,  at  a  time  of  unusual 
suspicions  and  hence  of  unusual  hazards,  this  eager 
ness  to  prove  orthodoxy  by  choler  was  copiously 
on  exhibition.  Thus^  oae  of  the  leading  American 
zoologists  jprinted  a  t  work  in  which,  _after_starting 
off  by  denouncing  the  German  naming  of  new 
species  as  ignorant,  dishonest  and  against  God,  he 
ilmself  up  to  the^doctrine  that 


any  American  who  put  a  tooth  into  a  slab  of 
Rinderbrust  mit  Meerrettig,  or  peeped  at  Simplicis- 
simus  with  the  blinds  down,  or  bought  his  children 
German-made  jumping-jacks,  was  a  traitor  to  the 
Constitution  and  a  secret  agent  of  the  Wilhelm- 
strasse.  And  thus  there  were  American  patholo- 
gists  and  bacteriologists  who  denounced  Prof.  Dr. 
Paul  Ehrlich  as  little  better  than  a  quack  hired  by 
the  Krupps  to  poison  Americans,  and  who  displayed 
their  pious  horror  of  the  late  Prof.  Dr.  Robert 
Koch  by  omitting  all  acknowledgment  of  obligation 
to  him  from  their  monographs.  And  finally  there 
was  the  posse  of  "two  thousand  American  Histor 
ians"  assembled  by  Mr.  Creel  to  instruct  the  plain 
people  in  the  new  theory  of  American  history, 
whereby  the  Revolution  was  represented  as  a  la 
mentable  row  in  an  otherwise  happy  family,  delib- 
[69] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

erately  instigated  by  German  intrigue — a  posse 
which  reached  its  greatest  height  of  correct  indig 
nation  in  its  approval  of  the  celebrated  Sisson  docu 
ments,  to  the  obscene  delight  of  the  British  au 
thors  thereof. 

As  we  say,  we  are  devoid  of  all  such  lofty  pas 
sions,  and  hence  must  present  our  observations  in 
the  flat,  unimaginative,  unemotional  manner  of  a 
dentist  pulling  a  tooth.  It  would  not  be  going  too 
far,  in  fact,  to  call  us  emotional  idiots.  WhaLails 
us  is  a  constitutional  suspicion  that  the  otherjel- 
low,  after  all,  may  be  right,  or,  in  any  event,  partly 
jight.  In  the  present  case  we  by  no  means  repre 
hend  the  avoidance  of  issues  that  we  have  de 
scribed;  we  merely  record  it.  The  fact  is  that  it 
has  certain  very  obvious  uses,  and  is  probably  in 
evitable  in  a  democratic  society.  __It_ia ^commonly 
argued  that free  .speedh.  .is.  Jiecfissary^  to  the  pros 
perity  of  a jlemocr^cy,  -hutip  this  doctrine  we  take 
nonstock.  On  the  contrary,  there  are  plain  rea 
sons  for  holding  that  free  speech  is  more  dangerous 
to  a  democracy  than-lo  -any  -QthexJorm  of  govern 
ment,  and  no  doubt  these  reasons,  if  only  uncon 
sciously,  were  at  the  bottom  of  the  extraordinary 
body  of  repressive  legislation  :put  upon  the  books 

[70] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

during  the  late  war.  The  ^essential  thing  about  a 
democracy  is  that  the ;._men_  atjheTieaH  oTthe  state 
are  wholly  dependent,  for  a  continuance  of  their 
power,  upon  the  good  opinion  of  the  popular  ma 
jority.  While  they  are  actually  in  office,  true 
enough,  they  are  theoretically  almost  completely 
irresponsible,  but  their  terms  of  office  are  usually 
so  short  that  they  must  give  constant  thought  to 
the  imminent  canvassing  of  their  acts,  and  this 
threat  of  being  judged  and  turned  out  commonly 
greatly  conditions  their  exercise  of  their  power, 
even  while  they  hold  it  to  the  full.  Of  late,  in 
deed,  there  has  actually  arisen  the  doctrine  that 
they  are  responsible  at  all  times  and  must  respond 
to  every  shift  in  public  sentiment,  regardless  of 
their  own  inclinations,  and  there  has  even  grown  up 
the  custom  of  subjecting  them  to  formal  discipline, 
as  by  what  is  called  the  recall.  The  net  result  is 
that  a  public  officer  under  a  democracy  is  bound  to 
regard  the  popular  will  during  the  whole  of  his 
term  in  office,  and  cannot  hope  to  carry  out  any 
intelligible  plan  of  his  own  if  the  mob  has  been  set 
against  it. 

Now,  the  trouble  with  this  scheme  is  that  the 
mob  reaches  its  conclusions,  not  by  logical  steps 
[71] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

but  by  emotional  steps,  and  that  its  information 
upon  all  save  a  very  small  minority  of  the  questions 
publicly  at  issue  is  always  scant  and  inaccurate. 
It  is  thus  constantly  liable  to  inflammation  by  adroit 
demagogues,  or  rabble-rousers,  and  inasmuch  as 
these  rabble-rousers  are  animated  as  a  sole  motive 
by  the  hope  of  turning  out  the  existing  officers  of 
state  and  getting  the  offices  for  themselves,  the 
man  in  office  must  inevitably  regard  them  as  his 
enemies  and  the  doctrines  they  preach  as  subver 
sive  of  good  government.  This  view  is  not  alto 
gether  selfish.  There  is,  in  fact,  sound  logic  in  it, 
for  it  is  a  peculiarity  of  the  mob  mind  that  it  always 
takes  in  most  hospitably  what  is  intrinsically  most 
idiotic — that  between  two  antagonistic  leaders  it 
always  follows  the  one  who  is  longest  on  vague  and 
brilliant  words  and  shortest  on  sense.  Thus  the 
man  in  office,  if  he  would  be  free  to  carry  on  his 
duties  in  anything  approaching  freedom  and  com 
fort,  must  adopt  measures  against  that  tendency  to 
run  amuck. 

Three  devices  at  once  present  themselves.  One 
is  to  take  steps  against  the  rabble-rousers  by  seek 
ing  to  make  it  appear  that  they  are  traitors,  and 
so  arousing  the  mob  against  them — in  brief,  to 

[72] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

deny  them  their  constitutional  right  to  free  speech 
under  colour  of  criminal  statutes.  The  second  is 
to  combine  this  plan  with  that  of  flooding  the  coun 
try  with  official  news  by  a  corps  of  press-agents, 
chautauquans  and  other  such  professors  of  decep 
tion.  The  third  is  to  meet  the  rabble-rousers  on 
their  own  ground,  matching  their  appeals  to  the 
emotions  with  appeals  even  more  powerful,  and  out 
doing  their  vague  and  soothing  words  with  words 
even  more  vague  and  soothing.  All  three  plans 
have  been  in  operation  since  the  first  days  of  the 
republic;  the  early  Federalists  employed  the  first 
two  with  such  assiduity  that  the  mob  of  that  time 
finally  revolted.  All  three  have  been  brought  to 
the  highest  conceivable  point  of  perfection  by  Dr. 
Wilson,  a  man  whose  resolute  fidelity  to  his  moral 
ideas  is  matched  only  by  his  magnificent  skill  at 
playing  upon  every  prejudice  and  weakness  of  the 
plain  people. 

But  men  of  such  exalted  and  varied  gifts  are  not 
common.  The  average  head  of  a  democratic  state 
is  not  ipso  facto  the  best  rabble-rouser  within  that 
state,  but  merely  one  of  the  best.  He  may  be  able, 
on  fair  terms,  to  meet  any  individual  rival,  but  it 
is  rare  for  him  to  be  able  to  meet  the  whole  pack, 
[73] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

or  even  any  considerable  group.  To  relieve  him 
from  that  difficulty,  and  so  prevent  the  incessant 
running  amuck  of  the  populace,  it  is  necessary  to 
handicap  all  the  remaining  rabble-rousers,  and  this 
is  most  effectively  done  by  limitations  upon  free 
speech  which  originate  as  statutes  and  gradually 
take  on  the  form  and  potency  of  national  customs. 
Such  limitations  arose  in  the  United  States  by  pre 
cisely  that  process.  They  began  in  the  first  years 
of  the  republic  as  definite  laws.  Some  of  those 
laws  were  afterward  abandoned,  but  what  was  fun 
damentally  sound  in  them  remained  in  force  as 
custom. 

It  must  be  obvious  that  even  Dr.  Wilson,  despite 
his  tremendous  gift  for  the  third  of  the  devices  that 
we  have  named,  would  have  been  in  sore  case  dur 
ing  his  second  administration  if  it  had  not  been 
for  his  employment  of  the  other  two.  Imagine  the 
United  States  during  the  Summer  of  1917  with  ab 
solute  free  speech  the  order  of  the  day!  The 
mails  would  have  been  flooded  with  Socialist  and 
pacifist  documents,  every  street-corner  would  have 
had  its  screaming  soap-box  orator,  the  newspapers 
would  have  shaken  the  very  heavens  with  colossal 
alarms,  and  conscientious  objection  would  have 
[74] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

taken  on  the  proportions  of  a  national  frenzy.  In 
the  face  of  such  an  avalanche  of  fears  and  balder 
dash,  there  would  have  been  no  work  at  all  for  the 
German  propagandists;  in  fact,  it  is  likely  that  a 
great  many  of  them,  under  suspicion  on  account  of 
their  relative  moderation,  would  have  been  lynched 
as  agents  of  the  American  munitions  patriots.  For 
the  mob,  it  must  be  remembered,  infallibly  in 
clines,  not  to  the  side  of  the  soundest  logic  and 
loftiest  purpose,  but  to  the  side  of  the  loudest  noise, 
and  without  the  artificial  aid  of  a  large  and  com 
plex  organization  of  press-agents  and  the  power  to 
jail  any  especially  effective  opponent  forthwith, 
even  a  President  of  the  United  States  would  be  un 
able  to  bawl  down  the  whole  fraternity.  That  it  is 
matter  of  the  utmost  importance,  in  time  of  war,  to 
avoid  any  such  internal  reign  of  terror  must  be 
obvious  to  even  the  most  fanatical  advocate  of  free 
speech.  There  must  be,  in  such  emergencies,  a 
resolute  pursuit  of  coherent  policies,  and  that  would 
be  obviously  impossible  with  the  populace  turning 
distractedly  to  one  bogus  messiah  after  another,  and 
always  seeking  to  force  its  latest  craze  upon  the 
government.  Thus,  while  one  may  perchance  drop 
a  tear  or  two  upon  the  Socialists  jailed  by  a  sort  of 
[75] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

lynch  law  for  trying  to  exercise  their  plain  con 
stitutional  rights,  and  upon  the  pacifists  tarred  and 
feathered  by  mobs  led  by  government  agents,  and 
upon  the  conscientious  objectors  starved  and 
clubbed  to  death  in  military  dungeons,  it  must  still 
be  plain  that  such  barbarous  penalties  were  essen 
tially  necessary.  The  victims,  in  the  main,  were 
half-wits  suffering  from  the  martyr  complex;  it 
was  their  admitted  desire  to  sacrifice  themselves  for 
the  Larger  Good.  This  desire  was  gratified — not 
in  the  way  they  hoped  for,  of  course,  but  never 
theless  in  a  way  that  must  have  given  any  impartial 
observer  a  feeling  of  profound,  if  discreditable, 
satisfaction. 

What  a  republic  has  to  fear  especially  is  the 
rabble-rouser  who  advocates  giving  an  objective 
reality  to  the  gaudy  theories  which  lie  at  the  founda 
tions  of  the  prevailing  scheme  of  government.  He 
is  far  more  dangerous  than  a  genuine  revolutionist, 
for  the  latter  comes  with  ideas  that  are  actually  new, 
or,  at  all  events,  new  to  the  mob,  and  so  he  has  to 
overcome  its  congenital  hostility  to  novelty.  But 
the  reformer  who,  under  a  democracy,  bases  his 
case  upon  the  principles  upon  which  democracy  is 
founded  has  an  easy  road,  for  the  populace  is 
[76] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

familiar  with  those  principles  and  eager  to  see 
them  put  into  practical  effect.  The  late  Cecil 
Chesterton,  in  his  penetrating  "History  of  the 
United  States,"  showed  how  Andrew  Jackson  came 
to  power  by  that  route.  Jackson,  he  said,  was 
simply  a  man  so  naive  that  he  accepted  the  lofty 
doctrines  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence  with 
out  any  critical  questioning  whatever,  and  "really 
acted  as  if  they  were  true."  The  appearance  of 
such  a  man,  he  goes  on,  was  "appalling"  to  the 
political  aristocrats  of  1825.  They  themselves,  of 
course,  enunciated  those  doctrines  daily  and  based 
their  whole  politics  upon  them — but  not  to  the  point 
of  really  executing  them.  So  when  Jackson  came 
down  from  the  mountains  with  the  same  sonorous 
words  upon  his  lips,  but  with  the  addition  of  a 
solemn  promise  to  carry  them  out — when  he  thus 
descended  upon  them,  he  stole  their  thunder  and 
spiked  their  guns,  and  after  a  brief  struggle  he  had 
disposed  of  them.  The  Socialists,  free-speech 
fanatics,  anti-conscriptionists,  anti-militarists  and 
other  such  democratic  maximalists  of  1917  and 
1918  were,  in  essence,  nothing  but  a  new  and  for 
midable  horde  of  Jacksons.  Their  case  rested 
upon  principles  held  to  be  true  by  all  good  Ameri- 
[77] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

cans,  and  constantly  reaffirmed  by  the  highest 
officers  of  state.  It  was  thus  extremely  likely  that, 
if  they  were  permitted  to  woo  the  public  ear,  they 
would  quickly  amass  a  majority  of  suffrages,  and  so 
get  the  conduct  of  things  into  their  own  hands.  So 
it  became  necessary,  in  order  that  the  great  enter 
prises  then  under  way  might  be  pushed  to  a  suc 
cessful  issue,  that  all  these  marplots  be  silenced, 
and  it  was  accordingly  done.  This  proceeding,  of 
course,  was  theoretically  violative  of  their  com 
mon  rights,  and  hence  theoretically  un-American. 
All  the  theory,  in  fact,  was  on  the  side  of  the  vic 
tims.  But  war  time  is  no  time  for  theories,  and  a 
man  with  war  powers  in  his  hands  is  not  one  to 
parley  with  them. 

As  we  have  said,  the  menace  presented  by  such 
unintelligent  literalists  is  probably  a  good  deal 
more  dangerous  to  a  democracy  than  to  a  govern 
ment  of  any  other  form.  Under  an  aristocracy, 
for  example,  such  as  prevailed,  in  one  form  or 
another,  in  England,  Germany,  Italy  and  France 
before  the  war,  it  is  possible  to  give  doctrinaires  a 
relatively  free  rein,  for  even  if  they  succeed  in  con 
verting  the  mob  to  their  whim-wham,  there  remain 
insuperable  impediments  to  its  adoption  and  execu- 

[78] 


THE    AMERICAN    CREDO 

tion  as  law.  In  England,  as  every  one  knows,  the 
impediment  was  a  ruling  caste  highly  skilled  in 
the  governmental  function  and  generally  trusted  by 
a  majority  of  the  populace — a  ruling  caste  firmly 
intrenched  in  the  House  of  Lords  and  scarcely  less 
powerful  in  the  House  of  Commons.  In  France  it 
was  a  bureaucracy  so  securely  protected  by  law  and 
custom  that  nothing  short  of  a  political  cataclysm 
could  shake  it.  In  Germany  and  Italy  it  was  an 
aristocracy  buttressed  by  laws  cunningly  designed 
to  nullify  the  numerical  superiority  of  the  mob,  and 
by  a  monarchical  theory  that  set  up  a  heavy  counter 
weight  to  public  opinion. 

In  the  face  of  such  adroit  checks  and  balances 
it  is  a  matter  of  relative  indifference  whether  the 
mob  blows  scalding  hot  or  freezing  cold.  What 
ever  the  extravagance  of  its  crazes,  there  remains 
effective  machinery  for  holding  them  in  check  until 
they  spend  themselves,  which  is  usually  soon 
enough.  Thus  the  English  government,  though 
theoretically  as  much  opposed  to  anarchists  as  the 
American  government,  gave  them  cheerful  asylum 
before  the  war  and  permitted  them  to  preach  their 
lamentable  notions  almost  without .  check,  whereas 
in  America  they  early  aroused  great  fears  and 
[79] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

were  presently  put  under  such  disabilities  that  their 
propaganda  became  almost  impossible.  Even  in 
France,  where  they  had  many  converts  and  were 
frequently  in  eruption,  there  was  far  more  hospi 
tality  to  them  than  in  the  United  States.  And  thus 
in  the  Germany  of  Bismarck's  day,  the  Socialists, 
after  a  brief  and  aberrant  attempt  to  suppress  them, 
were  allowed  to  run  free,  despite  the  fact  that  their 
doctrine  was  quite  as  abhorrent  to  German  official 
doctrine  as  anarchism  was  to  American  official  doc 
trine.  The  German  ruling  caste  of  those  days  was 
sheltered  behind  laws  and  customs  which  enabled 
it  to  pull  the  teeth  of  Socialism,  even  in  the  face  of 
enormous  Socialist  majorities.  But  under  a  de 
mocracy  it  is  difficult,  and  often  downright  impos 
sible,  to  oppose  the  popular  craze  of  the  moment 
with  any  effect,  and  so  there  must  be  artificial  means 
of  disciplining  the  jake-fetchers  who  seek  to  set 
such  enthusiasms  in  motion.  The  shivering  fear 
of  Bolshevism,  visible  of  late  among  the  capitalists 
of  America,  is  based  upon  a  real  danger.  These 
capitalists  have  passed  through  the  burning  fires 
of  Rooseveltian  trust-busting  and  Bryanistic  pop 
ulism,  and  they  know  very  well  that  half  a  dozen 
Lenines  and  Trotskis,  turned  loose  upon  the  plain 

[80] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

people,  would  quickly  recruit  a  majority  of  them 
for  a  holy  war  upon  capital,  and  that  they  have  the 
political  power  to  make  such  a  holy  war  devastating. 
The  amateur  of  popular  psychology  may  wonder 
why  it  is  that  the  mob,  in  the  face  of  the  repressions 
constantly  practised  in  the  United  States,  does  not 
occasionally  rise  in  revolt,  and  so  get  back  its  right 
to  be  wooed  and  ravished  by  all  sorts  of  mounte 
banks.  Theoretically  it  has  that  right,  and  what 
is  more,  it  has  the  means  of  regaining  it;  nothing 
could  resist  it  if  it  made  absolute  free  speech  an 
issue  in  a  national  campaign  and  voted  for  the 
candidate  advocating  it.  But  something  is  over 
looked  here,  and  that  is  the  fact  that  the  mob  has 
no  liking  for  free  speech  per  se.  Some  of  the 
grounds  of  its  animosity  we  have  rehearsed. 
Others  are  not  far  to  seek.  One  of  them  lies  in  the 
mob's  chronic  suspicion  of  all  advocates  of  ideas, 
born  of  its  distaste  for  ideas  themselves.  The  mob- 
man  cannot  imagine  himself  throwing  up  his  job 
and  deserting  his  home,  his  lodge  and  his  speak 
easy  to  carry  a  new  gospel  to  his  fellows,  and  so  he 
is  inclined  to  examine  the  motives  of  any  other  man 
who  does  so.  The  one  motive  that  is  intelligible  to 
him  is  the  desire  for  profit,  and  he  commonly  con- 

[81] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

eludes  at  once  that  this  is  what  moves  the  prop 
agandist  before  him.  His  reasoning  is  defective, 
but  his  conclusion  is  usually  not  far  from  wrong. 
In  point  of  fact,  idealism  is  not  a  passion  in 
America,  but  a  trade;  all  the  salient  idealists  make 
a  living  at  it,  and  some  of  them,  for  example,  Dr. 
Bryan  and  the  Rev.  Dr.  Sunday,  are  commonly  be 
lieved  to  have  amassed  large  fortunes.  For  an 
American  to  advocate  a  cause  without  any  hope  of 
private  usufruct  is  almost  unheard  of;  it  would  be 
difficult  to  find  such  a  man  who  was  not  plainly  in 
sane.  The  most  eloquent  and  impassioned  of 
American  idealists  are  candidates  for  public  office; 
on  the  lower  levels  idealism  is  no  more  than  a  hand 
maiden  of  business,  like  advertising  or  belonging 
to  the  Men  and  Religion  Forward  Movement. 

Another  and  very  important  cause  of  the  pro 
letarian's  failure  to  whoop  for  free  speech  is  to  be 
found  in  his  barbarous  delight  in  persecution,  re 
gardless  of  the  merits  of  the  cause.  The  spectacle 
of  a  man  exercising  the  right  of  free  speech  yields, 
intrinsically,  no  joy,  for  there  is  seldom  anything 
dramatic  about  it.  But  the  spectacle  of  a  man 
being  mobbed,  jailed,  beaten  and  perhaps  murdered 
for  trying  to  exercise  it  is  a  good  show  like  any 
[82] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

other  good  show,  and  the  populace  is  thus  not  only 
eager  to  witness  it  but  even  willing  to  help  it  along. 
It  is  therefore  quite  easy  to  set  the  mob  upon,  say, 
the  Bolsheviki,  despite  the  fact  that  the  Bolsheviki 
have  the  professed  aim  of  doing  the  mob  an  incom 
parable  service.  During  the  late  high  jinks  of  the 
Postoffice  and  the  Department  of  Justice,  popular 
opinion  was  always  on  the  side  of  the  raiding 
parties.  It  applauded  every  descent  upon  a  So 
cialist  or  pacifist  meeting,  not  because  it  was  very 
hotly  in  favour  of  war — in  fact,  it  was  lukewarm 
about  war,  and  resisted  all  efforts  to  heat  it  up  until 
overwhelming  swarms  of  yokel-yankers  were  turned 
upon  it — but  because  it  was  in  favour  of  a  safe  and 
stimulating  form  of  rough-house,  with  the  police 
helping  instead  of  hindering.  It  never  stopped  to 
inquire  about  the  merits  of  the  matter.  All  it  asked 
for  was  a  melodramatic  raid,  followed  by  a  noisy 
trial  of  the  accused  in  the  newspapers,  and  the  daily 
publication  of  sensational  (and  usually  bogus) 
evidence  about  the  discovery  of  compromising  lit 
erature  in  his  wife's  stockings,  including  records  of 
his  receipt  of  $100,000  from  von  Bernstorff,  Car- 
ranza  or  some  other  transient  hobgoblin.  The  cele 
brated  O'Leary  trial  was  typical.  After  months  of 

[83] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

blood-curdling  charges  in  the  press,  it  turned  out 
when  the  accused  got  before  a  court  that  the  ev 
idence  against  him,  on  which  it  was  sought  to  con 
vict  him  of  a  capital  offence,  was  so  feeble  that  it 
would  have  scarcely  sufficed  to  convict  him  of  an 
ordinary  misdemeanor,  and  that  most  of  this  feeble 
testimony  was  palpably  perjured.  Nevertheless, 
public  opinion  was  nearly  unanimously  against  him 
from  first  to  last,  and  the  jury  which  acquitted  him 
was  almost  apologetic  about  its  inability  to  give  the 
populace  the  crowning  happiness  of  a  state  hanging. 
Under  cover  of  the  war,  of  course,  the  business 
of  providing  such  shows  prospered  extraordinarily, 
but  it  is  very  active  even  in  time  of  peace.  The  sur 
est  way  to  get  on  in  politics  in  America  is  to  play  the 
leading  part  in  a  prosecution  which  attracts  public 
notice.  The  list  of  statesmen  who  have  risen  in 
that  fashion  includes  the  names  of  many  of  the 
highest  dignity,  e.  g.,  Hughes,  Folk,  Whitman, 
Heney,  Baker  and  Palmer.  Every  district  attorney 
in  America  prays  nightly  that  God  will  deliver 
into  his  hands  some  Thaw,  or  Becker,  or  O'Leary, 
that  he  may  get  upon  the  front  pages  and  so  become 
a  governor,  a  United  States  senator,  or  a  justice  of 
the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States.  The  late 

[84] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

crusade  against  W.  R.  Hearst,  which  appeared  to 
the  public  as  a  great  patriotic  movement,  was  actu 
ally  chiefly  managed  by  a  subordinate  prosecuting 
officer  who  hoped  to  get  high  office  out  of  it. 

This  last  aspirant  failed  in  his  enterprise  largely 
because  he  had  tackled  a  man  who  was  himself  of 
superb  talents  as  a  rouser  of  the  proletariat,  but 
nine  times  out  of  ten  the  thing  succeeds.  Its  suc 
cess  is  due  almost  entirely  to  the  factor  that  we 
have  mentioned,  to  wit,  to  the  circumstance  that  the 
sympathy  of  the  public  is  always  on  the  side  of  the 
prosecution.  This  sympathy  goes  so  far  that  it 
is  ready  to  condone  the  most  outrageous  conduct 
in  judges  and  prosecuting  officers,  providing  only 
they  give  good  shows.  During  the  late  war  upon 
Socialists,  pacifists,  anti-conscriptionists  and  other 
such  heretics,  judges  theoretically  employed  to  in 
sure  fair  trials  engaged  in  the  most  amazing  at 
tacks  upon  prisoners  before  them,  denouncing  them 
without  hearing  them,  shutting  out  evidence  on 
their  side  and  making  stump  speeches  to  the  jury 
against  them.  That  conduct  aroused  no  public  in 
dignation;  on  the  contrary,  such  judges  were  fre 
quently  praised  in  the  newspapers  and  a  good  many 
of  them  were  promoted  to  higher  courts.  Even  in 
[85] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

time  of  peace  there  is  no  general  antipathy  to  that 
sort  of  thing.  At  least  two-thirds  of  our  judges, 
federal,  state  and  municipal,  colour  their  decisions 
with  the  newspaper  gabble  of  the  moment;  even  the 
Supreme  Court  has  shown  itself  delicately  respon 
sive  to  the  successive  manias  of  the  Uplift,  which  is, 
at  bottom,  no  more  than  an  organized  scheme  for  in 
venting  new  crimes  and  making  noisy  pursuit  of 
new  categories  of  criminals.  Some  time  ago  an 
intelligent  Mexican,  after  studying  our  courts,  told 
us  that  he  was  surprised  that,  in  a  land  ostensibly  of 
liberty,  so  few  of  the  notorious  newspaper-wooers 
and  blacklegs  upon  the  bench  were  assassinated. 
It  is,  in  fact,  rather  curious.  The  thing  happens 
very  seldom,  and  then  it  is  usually  in  the  South, 
where  the  motive  is  not  altruistic  but  political. 
That  is  to  say,  the  assassin  merely  desires  to  remove 
one  blackleg  in  order  to  make  a  place  for  some  other 
blackleg.  He  has  no  objection  to  systematized  in 
justice;  all  he  desires  is  that  it  be  dispensed  in 
favour  of  his  own  side. 

VI 

The  mob   delight   in   melodramatic   and   cruel 
spectacles,  thus  constantly  fed  and  fostered  by  the 

[86] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

judicial  arm  in  the  United  States,  is  also  at  the 
bottom  of  another  familiar  American  phenomenon, 
to  wit,  lynching.  A  good  part  of  the  enormous 
literature  of  lynching  is  devoted  to  a  discussion  of 
its  causes,  but  most  of  that  discussion  is  ignorant 
and  some  of  it  is  deliberately  mendacious.  The 
majority  of  Southern  commentators  argue  that  the 
motive  of  the  lynchers  is  a  laudable  yearning  to 
"protect  Southern  womanhood,"  despite  the  plain 
fact  that  only  a  very  small  proportion  of  the  black 
amoors  hanged  and  burned  are  even  so  much  as 
accused  of  molesting  Southern  womanhood.  On 
the  other  hand,  some  of  the  negro  intellectuals  of 
the  North  ascribe  the  recurrent  butcheries  to  the 
Southern  white  man's  economic  jealousy  of  the 
Southern  black,  who  is  fast  acquiring  property  and 
reaching  out  for  the  prerogatives  that  go  therewith. 
Finally,  certain  white  Northerners  seek  a  cause  in 
mere  political  animosity,  arguing  that  the  Southern 
white  hates  the  negro  because  the  latter  is  his  the 
oretical  equal  at  the  polls,  though  actually  not  per 
mitted  to  vote. 

All  of  these  notions  seem  to  us  to  be  fanciful. 
Lynching  is  popular  in  the  South  simply  because 
the  Southern  populace,  like  any  other  populace, 

[87] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

delights  in  thrilling  shows,  and  because  no  other 
sort  of  show  is  provided  by  the  backward  culture  of 
the  region.  The  introduction  of  prize-fighting 
down  there,  or  baseball  on  a  large  scale,  or  amuse 
ment  places  like  Coney  Island,  or  amateur  athletic 
contests,  or  picnics  like  those  held  by  the  more 
truculent  Irish  fraternal  organizations,  or  any  other 
such  wholesale  devices  for  shocking  and  diverting 
the  proletariat  would  undoubtedly  cause  a  great  de 
cline  in  lynching.  The  art  is  practised,  in  the 
overwhelming  main,  in  remote  and  God-forsaken 
regions,  in  which  the  only  rival  entertainment  is 
offered  by  one-sided  political  campaigns,  third-rate 
chautauquas  and  Methodist  revivals.  When  it  is 
imitated  in  the  North,  it  is  always  in  some  drab 
factory  or  mining  town.  Genuine  race  riots,  of 
course,  sometimes  occur  in  the  larger  cities,  but 
these  are  always  economic  in  origin,  and  have  noth 
ing  to  do  with  lynching,  properly  so-called.  One 
could  not  imagine  an  actual  lynching  at,  say, 
Atlantic  City,  with  ten  or  fifteen  bands  playing, 
blind  pigs  in  operation  up  every  alley,  a  theatre  in 
every  block  or  two,  and  the  boardwalk  swarming 
with  ladies  of  joy.  Even  a  Mississippian,  trans 
ported  to  such  scenes,  succumbs  to  the  atmosphere 

[88] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

of  pleasure,  and  so  has  no  seizures  of  moral  rage 
against  the  poor  darkey.  Lynching,  in  brief,  is  a 
phenomenon  of  isolated  and  stupid  communities, 
a  mark  of  imperfect  civilization;  it  follows  the 
hookworm  and  malaria  belt;  it  shows  itself  in  in 
verse  proportion  to  the  number  of  shoot-the-chutes, 
symphony  orchestras,  roof  gardens,  theatres,  horse 
races,  yellow  journals  and  automatic  pianos.  No 
one  ever  heard  of  a  lynching  in  Paris,  at  Newport, 
or  in  London.  But  there  are  incessant  lynchings 
in  the  remoter  parts  of  Russia,  in  the  backwoods  of 
Serbia,  Bulgaria  and  Herzegovina,  in  Mexico  and 
Nicaragua,  and  in  such  barbarous  American  states 
as  Alabama,  Georgia  and  South  Carolina. 

The  notion  that  lynching  in  the  South  is  counte 
nanced  by  the  gentry  or  that  they  take  an  actual 
hand  in  it  is  libelous  and  idiotic.  The  well-born 
and  well-bred  Southerner  is  no  more  a  savage  than 
any  other  man  of  condition.  He  may  live  among 
savages,  but  that  no  more  makes  him  a  savage  than 
an  English  gentleman  is  made  one  by  having  a  place 
in  Wales,  or  a  Russian  by  living  on  his  estate  in 
the  Ukraine.  What  Northern  observers  mistake 
for  the  gentry  of  the  South,  when  they  report  the 
participation  of  "leading  citizens"  in  a  lynching,  is 
[89] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

simply  the  office-holding  and  commercial  bour 
geoisie — the  offspring  of  the  poor  white  trash  who 
skulked  at  home  during  the  Civil  War,  robbing  the 
widows  and  orphans  of  the  soldiers  at  the  front, 
and  so  laying  the  foundations  of  the  present  "in 
dustrial  prosperity"  of  the  section,  i.  e.,  its  con 
version  from  a  region  of  large  landed  estates  and 
urbane  life  into  a  region  of  stinking  factories, 
filthy  mining  and  oil  towns,  child-killing  cotton 
mills,  vociferous  chambers  of  commerce  and  other 
such  swineries.  It  is,  of  course,  a  fact  that  the 
average  lynching  party  in  Mississippi  or  Alabama 
is  led  by  the  mayor  and  that  the  town  judge  climbs 
down  from  his  bench  to  give  it  his  official  support, 
but  it  is  surely  not  a  fact  that  these  persons  are  of 
the  line  of  such  earlier  public  functionaries  as 
Pickens,  Troup  and  Pettus.  On  the  contrary,  they 
correspond  to  the  lesser  sort  of  Tammany  office 
holders  ajid  to  the  vermin  who  monopolize  the  pub 
lic  functions  in  such  cities  as  Boston  and  Phil 
adelphia.  The  gentry,  with  few  exceptions,  have 
been  forced  out  of  the  public  service  everywhere 
south  of  the  Potomac,  if  not  out  of  politics.  The 
Democratic  victory  in  1912  flooded  all  the  govern 
mental  posts  at  Washington  with  Southerners,  and 
[90] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

they  remain  in  power  to  this  day,  and  some  of 
them  are  among  the  chief  officers  of  the  nation. 
But  in  the  whole  vast  corps  there  are,  we  believe, 
but  ten  who  would  be  accepted  as  gentlemen  by 
Southern  standards,  and  only  three  of  these  are  in 
posts  of  any  importance.  In  the  two  houses  of 
Congress  there  is  but  one. 

It  is  thus  absurd  to  drag  the  gentry  of  the 
South — the  Bourbons  of  New  England  legend — into 
a  discussion  of  the  lynching  problem.  They 
represent,  in  fact,  what  remains  of  the  only  genuine 
aristocracy  ever  visible  in  the  United  States,  and 
lynching,  on  the  theoretical  side,  is  far  too  moral 
a  matter  ever  to  engage  an  aristocracy.  The  true 
lynchers  are  the  plain  people,  and  at  the  bottom  of 
the  sport  there  is  nothing  more  noble  than  the  mob 
man's  chronic  and  ineradicable  poltroonery. 
Cruel  by  nature,  delighting  in  sanguinary  spec 
tacles,  and  here  brought  to  hatred  of  the  negro  by 
the  latter's  increasing  industrial,  (not  political, 
capitalistic  or  social)  rivalry,  he  naturally  diverts 
himself  in  his  moments  of  musing  with  visions  of 
what  he  would  do  to  this  or  that  Moor  if  he  had  the 
courage.  Unluckily,  he  hasn't,  and  so  he  is  unable 
to  execute  his  dream  a  cappella.  If,  inflamed  by 
[91] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

liquor,  he  attempts  it,  the  Moor  commonly  gives 
him  a  beating,  or  even  murders  him.  But  what 
thus  lies  beyond  his  talents  as  an  individual  at  once 
becomes  feasible  when  he  joins  himself  with  other 
men  in  a  like  situation.  This  is  the  genesis  of  a 
mob  of  lynchers.  It  is  composed  primarily  of  a 
few  men  with  definite  grievances,  sometimes  against 
the  negro  lynched  but  often  against  quite  different 
negroes.  It  is  composed  secondarily  of  a  large 
number  of  fifth-rate  men  eager  for  a  thrilling  show, 
involving  no  personal  danger.  It  is  composed  in 
the  third  place  of  a  few  rabble-rousers  and  poli 
ticians,  all  of  them  hot  to  exhibit  themselves  before 
the  populace  at  a  moment  of  public  excitement  and 
in  an  attitude  of  leadership.  It  is  the  second  ele 
ment  that  gives  life  to  the  general  impulse.  With 
out  its  ardent  appetite  for  a  rough  and  shocking 
spectacle  there  would  be  no  lynching.  Its  in 
fluence  is  plainly  shown  by  the  frequent  unintelligi- 
bility  of  the  whole  proceeding;  all  its  indignation 
over  the  crime  alleged  to  be  punished  is  an  after 
thought;  any  crime  will  answer,  once  its  blood  is 
up.  Thus  the  most  characteristic  lynchings  in  the 
South  are  not  those  in  which  a  confessed  criminal 
is  done  to  death  for  a  definite  crime,  but  those  in 
[92] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

which,  in  sheer  high  spirits,  some  convenient  Afri 
can  is  taken  at  random  and  lynched,  as  the  news 
papers  say,  "on  general  principles."  That  sort  of 
lynching  is  the  most  honest  and  normal,  and  we  are 
also  inclined  to  think  that  it  is  also  the  most  enjoy 
able,  for  the  other  sort  brings  moral  indignation 
with  it,  and  moral  indignation  is  disagreeable.  No 
man  can  be  both  indignant  and  happy. 

But  here,  seeking  to  throw  a  feeble  beam  or  two 
of  light  into  the  mental  processes  of  the  American 
proletarian,  we  find  ourselves  entering  upon  a  dis 
cussion  that  grows  narrow  and  perhaps  also  dull. 
Lynching,  after  all,  is  not  an  American  institution, 
but  a  peculiarly  Southern  institution,  and  even  in 
the  South  it  will  die  out  as  other  more  seemly 
recreations  are  introduced.  It  would  be  quite  easy, 
we  believe,  for  any  Southern  community  to  get  rid 
of  it  by  establishing  a  good  brass  band  and  having 
concerts  every  evening.  It  would  be  even  easier  to 
get  rid  of  it  by  borrowing  a  few  professional 
scoundrels  from  the  Department  of  Justice,  having 
them  raid  the  "study"  of  the  local  Methodist  arch 
deacon,  and  forthwith  trying  him  publicly — with 
a  candidate  for  governor  as  prosecuting  officer — for 
seduction  under  promise  of  salvation.  The  trouble 
[93] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

down  there  is  not  a  special  viciousness.  The 
Southern  poor  white,  taking  him  by  and  large,  is 
probably  no  worse  and  no  better  than  the  anthro 
poid  proletarian  of  the  North.  What  ails  the 
whole  region  is  Philistinism.  It  has  lost  its  old 
aristocracy  of  the  soil  and  has  not  yet  developed 
an  aristocracy  of  money.  The  result  is  that  its 
cultural  ideas  are  set  by  stupid  and  unimaginative 
men — Southern  equivalents  of  the  retired  Iowa 
steer  stuffers  and  grain  sharks  who  pollute  Los 
Angeles,  American  equivalents  of  the  rich  English 
nonconformists.  These  men,  though  they  have 
accumulated  wealth,  have  not  yet  acquired  the  ca 
pacity  to  enjoy  civilized  recreations.  Worse,  most 
of  them  are  still  so  barbarous  that  they  regard  such 
recreations  as  immoral.  The  dominating  opinion 
of  the  South  is  thus  against  most  of  the  devices  that 
would  diminish  lynching  by  providing  substitutes 
for  it.  In  every  Southern  town  some  noisy  clown 
of  a  Methodist  or  Presbyterian  clergyman  exercises 
a  local  tyranny.  These  men  are  firmly  against  all 
the  divertissements  of  more_  cultured  regions. 
They  oppose  prize-fighting,  horse-racing^  Sunday 
baseball  and  games  of  chance.  They  _are,  bitter 
prohibitionists.  By  their  incessant  vice-crusades 

-par 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

they_reduce  the  romance  of  sex  to  furtiveness  and 
piggishness.  _Tjiey_  know  nothing  of  jnusic  or  the 
drama,  and  view  a  public  library  merely  as  some 
thing  to  be  rigorously  censored.  We  are  convinced 
that  their  ignorant  moral  enthusiasm  is  largely  to 
blame  for  the  prevalence  of  lynching.  No  doubt 
they  themselves  are  sneakingly  conscious  of  the 
fact,  or  at  least  aware  of  it  subconsciously,  for 
lynching  is  the  only  public  amusement  that  they 
never  denounce. 

Their  jnfluence  reveals  strikingly  the  readiness 
of  the  mferioiL_America^^ 


opinions.  He  seQms_to_be4)athetically  eager  to  be 
told  what  to  thinly  and  he  is  apparently  willing  to 
acc^lan^mstru^r^hoj^^th^  trouble  to  tackle 
him.  This,  also,  was  brilliantly  revealed  during 
the  late  war.  The  powers  which  controlled  the 
press  during  that  fevered  time  swayed  the  populace 
as  they  pleased.  So  long  as  the  course  of  Dr. 
Wilson  was  satisfactory  to  them  he  was  depicted  as 
a  second  Lincoln,  and  the  plain  people  accepted  the 
estimate  without  question.  To  help  reinforce  it  the 
country  was  actually  flooded  with  lithographs  show 
ing  Lincoln  and  Wilson  wreathed  by  the  same 
branch  of  laurel,  and  copies  of  the  print  got  into 
[95] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

millions  of  humble  homes.  But  immediately  Dr. 
Wilson  gave  offence  to  his  superiors,  he  began  to 
be  depicted  as  an  idiot  and  a  scoundrel,  and  this 
judgment  promptly  displaced  the  other  one  in  the 
popular  mind.  The  late  Major  General  Roosevelt 
was  often  a  victim  of  that  sort  of  boob-bumping. 
A  man  of  mercurial  temperament,  constantly  shift 
ing  his  position  on  all  large  public  questions,  he 
alternately  gave  great  joy  and  great  alarm  to  the 
little  group  of  sagaciously  wilful  men  which  exer 
cises  genuine  sovereignty  over  the  country,  and  this 
alternation  of  emotions  showed  itself,  by  way  of  the 
newspapers  and  other  such  bawdy  agencies,  in  the 
vacillation  of  public  opinion.  The  fundamental 
platitudes  of  the  nation  were  used  both  for  him  and 
against  him,  and  always  with  immense  effect.  One 
year  he  was  the  last  living  defender  of  the  liberties 
fought  for  by  the  Fathers;  the  next  year  he  was  an 
anarchist.  Roosevelt  himself  was  much  annoyed 
by  this  unreliability  of  the  mob.  Now  and  then  he 
sought  to  overcome  it  by  direct  appeals,  but  in  the 
long  run  he  was  usually  beaten.  Toward  the  end 
of  his  life  he  resigned  himself  to  a  policy  of  great 
discretion,  and  so  withheld  his  voice  until  he  was 
sure  what  hymn  was  being  lined  out. 

[96] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

The  newspapers  and  press  associations,  of  course, 
do  not  impart  the  official  doctrine  of  the  moment  in 
terms  of  forthright  instructions;  they 'get  it  over,  as 
the  phrase  is,  in  the  form  of  delicate  suggestions, 
most  of  them  under  cover  of  the  fundamental  plati 
tudes  aforesaid.  Their  job  is  not  to  inspire  and 
inform  public  discussion,  but  simply  to  colour  it, 
and  the  task  most  frequently  before  them  is  that  of 
giving  a  patriotic  and  virtuous  appearance  to  what 
ever  the  proletariat  is  to  believe.  They  do  this,  of 
course,  to  the  tune  of  deafening  protestations  of 
their  own  honesty  and  altruism.  But  there  is  really 
no  such  thing  as  an  honest  newspaper  in  America; 
if  it  were  set  up  tomorrow  it  would  perish  within 
a  month.  Every  journal,  however  rich  and  power 
ful,  is  the  trembling  slave  of  higher  powers,  some 
financial,  some  religious  and  some  political.  It 
faces  a  multitude  of  censorships,  all  of  them  very 
potent.  It  is  censored  by  the  Postoffice,  by  the 
Jewish  advertisers,  by  the  Catholic  Church,  by  the 
Methodists,  by  the  Prohibitionists,  by  the  banking 
oligarchy  of  its  town,  and  often  by  even  more 
astounding  authorities,  including  the  Sinn  Fein. 
Now  and  then  a  newspaper  makes  a  valiant  gesture 
of  revolt,  but  it  is  only  a  gesture.  There  is  not  a 
[97] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

single  daily  in  the  United  States  that  would  dare 
to  discuss  the  problem  of  Jewish  immigration 
honestly.  Nine  tenths  of  them,  under  the  lash  of 
snobbish  Jewish  advertisers,  are  even  afraid  to  call 
a  Jew  a  Jew;  their  orders  are  to  call  him  a  Hebrew, 
which  is  regarded  as  sweeter.  During  the  height 
of  the  Bolshevist  scare  not  one  American  paper  ven 
tured  to  direct  attention  to  the  plain  and  obtrusive 
fact  that  the  majority  of  Bolshevists  in  Russia  and 
Germany  and  at  least  two-thirds  of  those  taken  in 
the  United  States  were  of  the  faith  of  Moses,  Men 
delssohn  and  Gimbel.  But  the  Jews  are  perhaps 
not  the  worst.  The  Methodists,  in  all  save  a  few 
big  cities,  exercise  a  control  over  the  press  that  is 
far  more  rigid  and  baleful.  In  the  Anti-Saloon 
League  they  have  developed  a  machine  for  terroriz 
ing  office-holders  and  the  newspapers  that  is  re 
markably  effective,  and  they  employed  it  during  the 
long  fight  for  Prohibition  to  throttle  all  opposition 
save  the  most  formal. 

In  this  last  case,  of  course,  the  idealists  who  thus 
forced  the  speak-easy  upon  the  country  had  an  easy 
task,  for  all  of  the  prevailing  assumptions  and 
prejudices  of  the  mob  were  in  their  favour.  No 
doubt  it  is  true,  as  has  been  alleged,  that  a 
[98] 


THE    AMERICAN    CREDO 

majority  of  the  voters  of  the  country  were  against 
Prohibition  and  would  have  defeated  it  at  a  ple 
biscite,  but  equally  without  doubt  a  majority  of 
them  were  against  the  politicians  so  brutally 
clubbed  by  the  Anti-Saloon  League,  and  ready 
to  believe  anything  evil  of  them,  and  eager 
to  see  them  manhandled.  Moreover,  the  League 
had  another  thing  in  its  favour:  it  was  operated  by 
strictly  moral  men,  oblivious  to  any  notion  of 
honour.  Thus  it  advocated  and  procured  the 
abolition  of  legalized  liquor  selling  without  the 
slightest  compensation  to  the  men  who  had  invested 
their  money  in  the  business  under  cover  of  and 
even  at  the  invitation  of  the  law — a  form  of  repu 
diation  and  confiscation  unheard  of  in  any  other 
civilized  country.  Again,  it  got  through  the  con 
stitutional  amendment  by  promising  the  liquor  men 
to  give  them  one  year  to  dispose  of  their  lawfully 
accumulated  stocks — and  then  broke  its  promise 
under  cover  of  alleged  war  necessity,  despite  the 
fact  that  the  war  was  actually  over.  Both  pro 
ceedings,  so  abhorrent  to  any  man  of  honour,  failed 
to  arouse  any  indignation  among  the  plain  people. 
On  the  contrary  the  plain  people  viewed  them  as, 
in  some  vague  way,  smart  and  creditable,  and  as,  in 
[99] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

any  case,  thoroughly  justified  by  the  superior  moral 
obligation  that  we  have  hitherto  discussed. 

Thus  the  Boobus  americanus^  lead  _and  watched 
over  by  zealous  jneiy  all  of-them-highly  skilled  at 
training  him  on  -the  way  4hat  he  should  think  and 
The  Constitution  oLJiis-J3Oiintry__  guarantees 


that  he  shall  beja  free  man L_.and_assumes  thaJLhe  is 
intelligent,  but __the_Ja_ws__  and_.  customs  that  Jiaye 
grown  up  under  that  Constitution  give  jhe  lie  to 
bb^  ^e__gMrajitej_ajid_die  assumption.  _  It  Js  the 
fundamental  theory  of  all  the  more  recent  American 
law,  in  fact,  that  the  average  citizen  is  half-witted, 
and  hence  not  to  be  trusted  to  either  his  own  devices 
or  his  own  thoughts.  If  therejvere  not  regulations 
against  tKe  saloon  (it  seems  to  say)  he  would  get 
drunk  every  day7~dissipate  his  means,  undermiile'his 
healtlf  and  beggar  His  family.  IF  there  were  not 
postal  regulations  as  loTilsTeading  matter,  he  would 
divide~Tns  tim^"4]^etw«en~Bulshevist  literature  and 
porno^mphi^Jite^atiire  and  so  become  at  once 
an  anarchi^t_aiid_a__guinea  pig.  \  If  he  were  not 
forbidden  under  heavy  penalitelfto  cross  a  state  line 
with  a  wench,  he  would  be  chronically  unfaithful 
to  his  wife.  Worse,  if  his  daughter  were  not  pro 
tected  by  statutes  of  the  most  draconian  severity, 
[100] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

she  would  succumb  to  the  first  Italian  she  en 
countered,  yield  up  her  person  to  him,  enroll  her 
self  upon  his  staff  and  go  upon  the  streets.  So 
runs  the  course  of  legislation  in  this  land  of  free 
men.  We  could  pile  up  example  upon  example, 
but  will  defer  the  business  for  the  present.  Per 
haps  it  may  be  resumed  in  a  work  one  of  us  is  now 
engaged  upon — a  full  length  study  of  the  popular 
mind  under  the  republic.  But  that  work  will  take 
years.  ...  •,.  ;  V , 

VII 

No  doubt  we  should  apologize  for  writing,  even 
so,  so  long  a  preface  to  so  succinct  a  book.  The 
one  excuse  we  can  think  of  is  that,  having  read  it, 
one  need  not  read  the  book.  That  book,  as  we  have 
said,  may  strike  the  superficial  as  jocular,  but  in 
actual  fact  it  is  a  very  serious  and  even  profound 
composition,  not  addressed  to  the  casual  reader,  but 
to  the  scholar.  Its  preparation  involved  a  great 
diligence,  and  its  study  is  not  to  be  undertaken 
lightly.  What  the  psychologist  will  find  to  admire 
in  it,  however,  is  not  its  learning  and  painstaking, 
its  laborious  erudition,  but  its  compression.  It 
establishes,  we  believe,  a  new  and  clearer  method 
[101] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

for  a  science  long  run  to  turgidity  and  flatulence. 
Perhaps  it  may  be  even  said  to  set  up  an  entirely 
new  science,  to  wit,  that  of  descriptive  sociological 
psychology.  We  believe  that  this  field  will  attract 
many  men  of  inquiring  mind  hereafter  and  yield 
a  valuable  crop  of  important  facts.  The  experi 
mental  method,  intrinsically  so  sound  and  useful, 
has  been  much  abused  by  orthodox  psychologists; 
it  inevitably  leads  them  into  a  trackless  maze  of 
meaningless  tables  and  diagrams;  they  keep  their 
eye?  so  resolutely  upon  the  intellectual  process  that 
they  pay  no  heed  to  the  primary  intellectual  ma 
terials.  Nevertheless,  it  must  be  obvious  that  the 
conclusions  that  a  man  comes  to,  the  emotions  that 
he  harbours  and  the  crazes  that  sway  him  are  of 
much  less  significance  than  the  fundamental  as 
sumptions  upon  which  they  are  all  based. 

There  has  been,  indeed,  some  discussion  of  those 
fundamental  assumptions  of  late.  We  have  heard, 
for  example,  many  acute  discourses  upon  the  effects 
produced  upon  the  whole  thinking  of  the  German 
people,  peasants  and  professors  alike,  by  the  under 
lying  German  assumption  that  the  late  Kaiser  was 
anointed  of  God  and  hence  above  all  ordinary 
human  responsibility.  We  have  heard  talk,  too,  of 
[102] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

the  curious  Irish  axiom  that  there  is  a  mysterious 
something  in  the  nature  of  things,  giving  the  Irish 
people  an  indefeasible  right  to  govern  Ireland  as 
they  please,  regardless  of  the  safety  of  their  next- 
door  neighbours.  And  we  have  heard  many  out 
landish  principles  of  the  same  sort  from  political 
theorists,  e.  g.,  regarding  the  inalienable  right  of 
democracy  to  prevail  over  all  other  forms  of 
government  and  the  inalienable  right  of  all  national 
groups,  however  small,  to  self-determination. 
Well,  here  is  an  attempt  to  assemble  in  convenient 
form,  without  comment  or  interpretation,  some  of 
the  fundamental  beliefs  of  the  largest  body  of 
human  beings  now  under  one  flag  in  Christendom. 
It  is  but  a  beginning.  The  field  is  barely  platted. 
It  must  be  explored  to  the  last  furlong  and  all  its 
fantastic  and  fascinating  treasures  unearthed  and 
examined  before  ever  there  can  be  any  accurate 
understanding  of  the  mind  of  the  American  people. 

GEORGE  JEAN  NATHAN 
H.  L.  MENCKEN 
New  York,  1920. 


[103] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 


[105] 


THE  AMERICAN  CREDO 

§1 

That  the  philoprogenitive  instinct  in  rabbits  is  so 
intense  that  the  alliance  of  two  normally  assiduous 
rabbits  is  productive  of  265  offspring  in  one  year. 

§2 

That  there  are  hundreds  of  letters  in  the  Dead 
Letter  Office  whose  failure  to  arrive  at  their  in 
tended  destinations  was  instrumental  in  separating 
as  many  lovers. 

§3 

That  the  Italian  who  sells  bananas  on  a  push-cart 
always  takes  the  bananas  home  at  night  and  sleeps 
with  them  under  his  bed. 

§4 

That  a  man's  stability  in  the  community  and 
reliability  in  business  may  be  measured  by  the  num 
ber  of  children  he  has. 

[107] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§5 

That  in  Japan  an  American  can  buy  a  beautiful 
geisha  for  two  dollars  and  that,  upon  being  bought, 
she  will  promptly  fall  madly  in  love  with  him  and 
will  run  his  house  for  him  in  a  scrupulously  clean 
manner. 

§6 

That  all  sailors  are  gifted  with  an  extraordinary 
propensity  for  amour,  but  that  on  their  first  night 
of  shore  leave  they  hang  around  the  water-front 
saloons  and  are  given  knock-out  drops. 

§7 

That  when  a  comedian,  just  before  the  rise  of  the 
curtain,  is  handed  a  telegram  announcing  the  death 
of  his  mother  or  only  child,  he  goes  out  on  the  stage 
and  gives  a  more  comic  performance  than  ever. 

§8 

That  the  lions  in  the  cage  which  a  lion-tamer 
enters  are  always  sixty  years  old  and  have  had  all 
their  teeth  pulled. 

§9 

That  the  Siamese  Twins  were  joined  together  by 
[108] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

gutta  percha  moulded  and  painted  to  look  like  a 
shoulder  blade. 

§10 

That  if  a  woman  about  to  become  a  mother  plays 
the  piano  every  day,  her  baby  will  be  born  a 
Victor  Herbert. 

§11 

That  all  excursion  boats  are  so  old  that  if  they 
ran  into  a  drifting  beer-keg  they  would  sink. 

§12 

That  a  doctor  knows  so  much  about  women  that 
he  can  no  longer  fall  in  love  with  one  of  them. 

§13 

That  when  one  takes  one's  best  girl  to  see  the     / 
monkeys  in  the  zoo,  the  monkeys  invariably  do 
something  that  is  very  embarrassing. 

§14 

That  firemen,  awakened  suddenly  in  the  middle 
of  the  night,  go  to  fires  in  their  stocking  feet. 
[109] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§15 

That  something  mysterious  goes  on  in  the  rooms 
back  of  chop  suey  restaurants. 

§16 

That  oil  of  pennyroyal  will  drive  away  mos 
quitoes. 

§17 

That  the  old  ladies  on  summer  hotel  verandas 
devote  themselves  entirely  to  the  discussion  of 
scandals. 

§18 

That  a  bachelor,  expecting  a  feminine  visitor, 
by  way  of  subtle  preliminary  strategy  smells  up  his 
rooms  with  Japanese  punk. 

§19 

That  all  one  has  to  do  to  gather  a  large  crowd  in 
New  York  is  to  stand  on  the  curb  a  few  moments 
and  ga~u  intently  at  the  sky. 

§20 

That  one  can  get  an  excellent  bottle  of  wine  in 
France  for  a  franc. 

[110] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
21 

That  it  is  dangerous  to  drink  out  of  a  garden 
hose,  since  if  one  does  one  is  likely  to  swallow  a 
snake. 

§22 
That  all  male  negroes  can  sing. 

§23 

That  when  a  girl  enters  a  hospital  as  a  nurse,  her 
primary  object  is  always  to  catch  one  of  the  doc 
tors. 

§24 

That  the  postmasters  in  small  towns  read  all  the 
postcards. 

§25 

That  a  young  girl  ought  to  devote  herself  sedu 
lously  to  her  piano  lessons  since,  when  she  is 
married,  her  playing  will  be  a  great  comfort  to  her 
husband. 

§26 

That  all  theater  box-office  employes  are  very  im 
polite  and  hate  to  sell  a  prospective  patron  a  ticket. 

cm] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§27 
That  all  great  men  have  illegible  signatures. 

§28 

That  all  iron-moulders  and  steam-fitters,  back  in 
the  days  of  freedom,  used  to  get  drunk  every  Satur 
day  night. 

§29 

That  if  a  man  takes  a  cold  bath  regularly  every 
morning  of  his  life  he  will  never  be  ill. 

§30 

That  ginger  snaps  are  made  of  the  sweepings  of 
the  floor  in  the  bakery. 

§31 

That  every  circus  clown's  heart  is  breaking  for 
one  reason  or  another. 

§32 

That  a  bull-fighter  always  has  so  many  women  in 
love  with  him  that  he  doesn't  know  what  to  do. 

§33 

"•       That  George  M.  Cohan  spends  all  his  time  hang- 

[112] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

ing  around  Broadway  cafes  and  street-corners  mak 
ing  flip  remarks. 

§34 

That  one  can  never  tell  accurately  what  the  public 
wants. 

§35 

That  every  time  one  sat  upon  an  old-fashioned 
horse-hair  sofa  one  of  the  protruding  sharp  hairs 
would  stab  one  through  the  union  suit. 

§36 

That  when  an  ocean  vessel  collides  with  another 
vessel  or  hits  an  iceberg  and  starts  to  sink,  the 
ship's  band  promptly  rushes  up  to  the  top  deck  and 
begins  playing  "Nearer,  My  God,  to  Thee." 

§37 

That  in  no  town  in  America  where  it  has  played 
has  "Uncle  Tom's  Cabin"  ever  failed  to  make 
money. 

§38 

That  the  tenement  districts  are  the  unhealthy 
places  they  are  because  the  dwellers  hang  their  bed- 
clothing  out  on  the  fire-escapes. 
[113] 


THE    AMERICAN    CREDO 
§39 

That,  in  small  town  hotels,  the  tap  marked  "hot 
water''  always  gives  forth  cold  water  and  that  the 
tap  marked  "cold"  always  gives  forth  hot. 

§40 

That  every  lieutenant  in  the  American  army  who 
went  to  France  had  an  affair  with  a  French  com- 
tesse. 

§41 

That  when  cousins  mam-,  their  children  are  born 
blind,  deformed,  or  imbecile. 

§42 

That  a  cat  falling  from  the  twentieth  story  of  the 

Singer  Building  will  land  upon  the  pavement  be 
low  on  its  feet,  uninjured  and  as  frisky  as  ever. 

§43 

That  the  accumulation  of  great  wealth  always 

brings  with  it  great  unhappineaB. 

§44 

That  it  is  unlucky  to  count  the  carriages  in  a 
funeral. 

[114] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§45 

That  the  roulette  wheel  at  Monte  Carlo  is  con 
trolled  by  a  wire  as  thin  as  a  hair  which  is  con 
trolled  in  turn  by  a  button  hidden  beneath  the  rug 
near  the  operator's  great  toe. 

§46 

That  Polish  women  are  so  little  human  that  one 
of  them  can  have  a  baby  at  8  A.  M.  and  cook  her 
husband's  dinner  at  noon. 

§47 
That  Henry  James  never  wrote  a  short  sentence. 

§48 
That  it  is  bad  luck  to  kill  a  spider. 

§49 

That  German  peasants  are  possessed  of  a  pro 
found  knowledge  of  music. 

§50 

That  every  coloured  cook  has  a  lover  who  never 
works,  and  that  she  feeds  him  by  stealing  the  best 
part  of  every  dish  she  cooks. 
[115] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§51 

That  George  Bernard  Shaw  doesn't  really  believe 
anything  he  writes. 

§52 

That  the  music  of  Richard  Wagner  is  all  played 
fortissimo,  and  by  cornets. 

§53 

That  the  Masonic  order  goes  back  to  the  days  of 
King  Solomon. 

§54 

That  swearing  is  forbidden  by  the  Bible. 

§55 
That  all  newspaper  reporters  carry  notebooks. 

§56 
That  whiskey  is  good  for  snake-bite. 

§57 

That  surgeons  often  kill  patients  for  the  sheer 
pleasure  of  it. 

§58 

That  ten  drops  of  camphor  in  half  a  glass  of 
water  will  prevent  a  cold. 
[116] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§59 

That  the  first  thing  a  country  jake  does  when  he 
comes  to  New  York  is  to  make  a  bee  line  for  Grant's 
Tomb  and  the  Aquarium. 

§60 

That  if  one's  nose  tickles  it  is  a  sign  that  one  is 
going  to  meet  a  stranger  or  kiss  a  fool. 

§61 

That  if  one's  right  ear  burns,  it  is  a  sign  that  some 
one  is  saying  nice  things  about  one. 

§62 

That  if  one's  left  ear  burns,  it  is  a  sign  that  some 
one  is  saying  mean  things  about  one. 

§63 

That  French  women  use  great  quantities  of  per 
fume  in  lieu  of  taking  a  bath. 

§64 

That  a  six-footer  is  invariably  a  virtuoso  of 
amour  superior  to  a  man  of,  say,  five  feet  seven. 
[117] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§65 

That  a  soubrette  is  always  fifteen  or  twenty  years 
older  than  she  looks. 

§66 

That  what  impels  most  men  to  have  their  finger 
nails  manicured  is  a  vanity  for  having  manicured 
finger-nails. 

§67 

That  water  rots  the  hair  and  thus  causes  baldness. 

§68 

That  when  one  twin  dies,  the  other  twin  becomes 
exceedingly  melancholy  and  soon  also  dies. 

§69 

That  one  may  always  successfully  get  a  cinder 
out  of  the  eye  by  not  touching  the  eye,  but  by  roll 
ing  it  in  an  outward  direction  and  simultaneously 
blowing  the  nose. 

§70 

That  if  one  wears  light  weight  underwear  winter 
and  summer  the  year  'round,  one  will  never  catch 
a  cold. 

[118] 


THE    AMERICAN    CREDO 

§71 

That  a  drunken  man  is  invariably  more  bellicose 
than  a  sober  man. 

§72 

That  all  prize-fighters  and  baseball  players  have 
their  hair  cut  round  in  the  back. 

§73 

That  the  work  of  a  detective  calls  for  excep 
tionally  high  sagacity  and  cunning. 

§74 

That  on  the  first  day  of  the  season  in  the  pleasure 
parks  many  persons,  owing  to  insufficiently  tested 
apparatus,  are  regularly  killed  on  the  roller- 
coasters. 

§75 

That  a  play,  a  novel,  or  a  short  story  with  a  happy 
ending  is  necessarily  a  commercialized  and  in 
artistic  piece  of  work. 

§76 

That  a  person  who  follows  up  a  cucumber  salad 
[119] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

with  a  dish  of  ice-cream  will  inevitably  be  the  victim 
of  cholera  morbus. 

§77 

That  a  Sunday  School  superintendent  is  always 
carrying  on  an  intrigue  with  one  of  the  girls  in  the 
choir. 

§78 

That  it  is  one  of  the  marks  of  a  gentleman  that 
he  never  speaks  evil  of  a  woman. 


That  a  member  of  the  Masons  cannot  be  hanged. 

§80 

That  a  policeman  can  eat  gratis  as  much  fruit 
and  as  many  peanuts  off  the  street-corner  stands  as 
he  wants. 

§81 

That  the  real  President  of  the  United  States  is 
J.  P.  Morgan. 

§82 

That  onion  breath  may  be  promptly  removed  by 
drinking  a  little  milk. 

[120] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§83 

That  onion  breath  may  be  promptly  removed 
by  eating  a  little  parsley. 

§  84 

That  Catholic  priests  conduct  their  private  con 
versations  in  Latin. 

§85 
That  John  Drew  is  a  great  society  man. 

§86 

That  all  Swedes  are  stupid  fellows,  and  have 
very  thick  skulls. 

§87 

That  all  the  posthumously  printed  stories  of 
David  Graham  Phillips  and  Jack  London  have  been 
written  by  hacks  hired  by  the  magazine  editors  and 
publishers. 

§88 

That  a  man  like  Charles  Schwab,  who  has  made 
a  great  success  of  the  steel  business,  could  in  the 
same  way  easily  have  become  a  great  composer 
[121] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

like  Bach  or  Mozart  had  he  been  minded  thus  to 
devote  his  talents. 

§89 

That  the  man  who  doesn't  hop  promptly  to  his 
feet  when  the  orchestra  plays  "The  Star  Spangled 
Banner"  as  an  overture  to  Hurtig  and  Seamen's 
"Hurly-Burly  Girlies"  must  have  either  rheu 
matism  or  pro-German  sympathies. 

§90 

That  every  workman  in  Henry  Ford's  factory 
owns  a  pretty  house  in  the  suburbs  and  has  a  rose- 
garden  in  the  back-yard. 

§91 

That  all  circus  people  are  very  pure  and  lead 
domestic  lives. 

§92 

That  if  a  spark  hits  a  celluloid  collar,  the  collar 
will  explode. 

§93 

That  when  a  bachelor  who  has  hated  children  for 
twenty  years  gets  married  and  discovers  he  is  about 
to  become  a  father,  he  is  delighted. 
[122] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§94 

That  drinking  three  drinks  of  whiskey  a  day  will 
prevent  pneumonia. 

§95 

That  every  negro  who  went  to  France  with  the 
army  had  a  liaison  with  a  white  woman  and  won't 
look  at  a  nigger  wench  any  more. 

§96 
That  all  Russians  have  unpronounceable  names. 

§97 
That  awnings  keep  rooms  cool. 

§98 

That  it  is  very  difficult  to  decipher  a  railroad 
time-table. 

§99 

That  gamblers  may  always  be  identified  by  their 
habit  of  wearing  large  diamonds. 

§100 

That  when  a  man  embarks  in  a  canoe  with  a  girl, 
[123] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

the  chances  are  two  to  one  that  the  girl  will  move 
around  when  the  boat  is  in  mid-stream  and  upset  it. 

§101 

That  German  babies  are  brought  up  on  beer  in 
place  of  milk. 

§102 

That  a  man  with  two  shots  of  cocaine  in  him 
could  lick  Jack  Dempsey. 

§103 

That  fully  one  half  the  repertoire  of  physical 
ailments  is  due  to  uric  acid. 

§104 

That  a  woman,  when  buying  a  cravat  for  a  man, 
always  picks  out  one  of  green  and  purple  with  red 
polka-dots. 

§105 

That  a  negro's  vote  may  always  be  readily  bought 
for  a  dollar. 

§106 

That  cripples  always  have  very  sunny  disposi 
tions. 

[124] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§107 

That  if  one  drops  a  crust  of  bread  into  one's 
glass  of  champagne,  one  can  drink  indefinitely 
without  getting  drunk. 

§108 

That  a  brass  band  always  makes  one  feel  like 
marching. 

§109 

That,  when  shaving  on  a  railway  train,  a  man 
invariably  cuts  himself. 

§110 

That  the  male  Spaniard  is  generally  a  handsome, 
flashing-eyed  fellow,  possessed  of  fiery  temper. 

§111 

That  after  drinking  a  glass  of  absinthe  one  has 
peculiar  hallucinations  and  nightmares. 

§112 

That  since  the  Indians  were  never  bald,  baldness 
comes  from  wearing  tight  hats. 
[125] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§113 
That  all  wine-agents  are  very  loose  men. 

§114 

That  the  editor  of  a  woman's  magazine  is  always 
a  lizzie. 

§115 

That  what  is  contained  in  the  pitcher  on  the 
speakers'  platform  is  always  ice-water. 

§116 

That  all  Senators  from  Texas  wear  sombreros, 
chew  tobacco,  expectorate  profusely,  and  frequently 
employ  the  word  "maverick." 

§117 

That  the  meters  on  taxicabs  are  covertly  manipu 
lated  by  the  chauffeurs  by  means  of  wires  hidden 
under  the  latters'  seats. 

§118 

That  Lillian  Russell  is  as  beautiful  today  as  she 
was  thirty-five  years  ago. 

[126] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§119 

That  if  a  young  woman  can  hold  a  lighted  match 
in  her  fingers  until  it  completely  burns  up,  it  is  a 
sign  that  her  young  man  really  loves  her. 

§120 

That  if  a  young  woman  accidentally  puts  on  her 
lingerie  wrong  side  out,  it  is  a  sign  that  she  will  be 
married  before  the  end  of  the  year. 

§121 

That  if  a  bride  wears  an  old  garter  with  her  new 
finery,  she  will  have  a  happy  married  life. 

§122 

That  a  sudden  chill  is  a  sign  that  somebody  is 
walking  over  one's  grave. 

§123 

That  some  ignoble  Italian  is  at  the  bottom  of 
every  Dorothy  Arnold  fugax. 

§124 

That  a  tarantula  will  not  crawl  over  a  piece  of 
rope. 

[127] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§125 
That  millionaires  always  go  to  sleep  at  the  opera. 

§126 

That  Paderewski  can  get  all  the  pianos  he  wants 
for  nothing. 

§127 

That  a  bloodhound  never  makes  a  mistake. 

§128 
That  celery  is  good  for  the  nerves. 

§129 
That  the  jokes  in  Punch  are  never  funny. 

§130 
That  the  Mohammedans  are  heathens. 

§131 

That  a  sudden  shock  may  cause  the  hair  to  turn 
grey  over  night. 

§132 

That  the  farmer  is  an  honest  man,  and  greatly 
imposed  upon. 

[128] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§133 

That  all  the  antique  furniture  sold  in  America 
is  made  in  Grand  Rapids,  Mich.,  and  that  the  holes 
testifying  to  its  age  are  made  either  with  gimlets 
or  by  trained  worms. 

§134 

That  if  a  dog  is  fond  of  a  man  it  is  an  infallible 
sign  that  the  man  is  a  good  sort,  and  one  to  be 
trusted. 

§135 

That  blondes  are  flightier  than  brunettes. 

§136 

That  a  nurse,  however  ugly,  always  looks  beauti 
ful  to  the  sick  man. 

§137 

That  book-keepers  are  always  round-shouldered. 

§138 

That  if  one  touches  a  hop-toad,  one  will  get 
warts. 

§139 

That  a  collar-button  that  drops  to  the  floor  when 
[129] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

one  is  dressing  invariably  rolls  into  an  obscure  and 
inaccessible  spot  and  eludes  the  explorations  of  its 
owner. 

§140 

That  an  American  ambassador  has  the  French, 
German,  Italian,  Spanish,  Portuguese,  Russian  and 
Japanese  languages  at  his  finger  tips,  and  is 
chummy  with  royalty. 

§141 

That  the  ready-made  mail  order  blue  serge  suits 
for  men  are  put  together  with  mucilage,  and  turn 
green  after  they  have  been  in  the  sunlight  for  a  day 
or  two. 

§142 

That  if  one  has  only  three  matches  left,  the  first 
two  will  invariably  go  out,  but  that  the  third  and 
last  will  remain  lighted. 

§143 
That  all  Chinamen  smoke  opium. 

§144 

That  every  country  girl  who  falls  has  been  se 
duced  by  a  man  from  the  city. 
[130] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§145 

That  an  intelligent  prize-fighter  always  triumphs 
over  an  ignorant  prize-fighter,  however  superior  the 
latter  in  agility  and  strength. 

§146 
That  a  doctor's  family  never  gets  sick. 

§147 

That  nature  designed  a  horse's  tail  primarily  as 
a  flicker-off  of  flies. 

§148 

That  nicotine  keeps  the  teeth  in  a  sound  con 
dition. 

§149 

That  when  an  Odd  Fellow  dies  he  is  always  given 
a  magnificent  funeral  by  his  lodge,  including  a  band 
and  a  parade. 

§150 

That  the  man  who  is  elected  president  of  the 
Senior  Class  in  a  college  is  always  the  most  popular 
man  in  his  class. 

§151 

That  a  minor  actress  in  a  theatrical  company  al- 
[131] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

ways  considers  the  leading  man  a  superb  creature, 
and  loves  him  at  a  distance. 

§152 
That  a  Southern  levee  is  a  gay  place. 

§153 

That  when  a  dog  whines  in  the  middle  of  the 
night,  it  is  a  sure  sign  that  some  one  is  going  to  die. 

§154 

That  the  stenographer  in  a  business  house  is  al 
ways  coveted  by  her  employer,  who  invites  her  to 
luncheon  frequently,  gradually  worms  his  way  into 
her  confidence,  keeps  her  after  office  hours  one 
day,  accomplishes  her  ruin,  and  then  sets  her  up  in 
a  magnificently  furnished  apartment  in  Riverside 
Drive  and  appeases  her  old  mother  by  paying  the 
latter's  expenses  for  a  summer  holiday  with  her 
daughter  at  the  seashore. 

§155 

That  the  extinction  of  the  Indian  has  been  a  de 
plorable  thing. 

[132] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§156 

That  everybody  has  a  stomach-ache  after  Thanks 
giving  dinner. 

§157 

That,  in  summer,  tan  shoes  are  much  cooler  on 
the  feet  than  black  shoes. 

§158 

That  every  man  who  calls  himself  Redmond  is  a 
Jew  whose  real  name  is  Rosenberg. 

§159 

That  General  Grant  never  directed  a  battle  save 
with  a  cigar  in  his  mouth. 

§160 

That  there  is  something  slightly  peculiar  about  a 
man  who  wears  spats. 

§161 

That  the  more  modest  a  young  girl  is,  the  more 
innocent  she  is. 

§162 

That  what  a  woman  admires  above  everything 
else  in  a  man  is  an  upright  character. 
[133] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§  163 
That  seafaring  men  drink  nothing  but  rum. 

§164 

That  no  family  in  the  slums  has  less  than  six 
children. 

§165 

That  a  piece  of  camphor  worn  on  a  string  around 
the  neck  will  ward  off  disease. 

§166 

That  a  saloon  with  a  sign  reading  "Family 
Entrance"  on  its  side  door  invariably  has  a  bawdy 
house  upstairs. 

§167 

That  the  wife  of  a  rich  man  always  wistfully 
looks  back  into  the  past  and  wishes  she  had  married 
a  poor  man. 

§168 

That  all  persons  prominent  in  smart  society  are 
very  dull. 

§169 

That  when  ordering  a  drink  of  whiskey  at  a  bar, 
[134] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

a  man  always  used  to  instruct  the  bartender  as  to 
the  size  of  the  drink  he  desired  by  saying  "two 
fingers"  or  "three  fingers." 

§170 

That  all  the  wine  formerly  served  in  Italian 
restaurants  was  made  in  the  cellar,  and  was  arti 
ficially  coloured  with  some  sort  of  dye  that  was  very 
harmful  to  the  stomach. 

§171 

That  bootblacks  whistle  because  they  are  so 
happy. 

§172 

That  stokers  on  ocean  liners  are  from  long 
service  so  used  to  the  heat  of  the  furnaces  that  they 
don't  notice  it. 

§173 

That  what  draws  men  to  horse  races  is  love  of  the 
sport. 

§174 

That  tarantulas  often  come  from  the  tropics  in 
bunches  of  bananas,  and  that  when  one  of  them 
[135] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

stings  a  negro  on  the  wharf  he  swells  up,  turns 
green  and  dies  within  three  hours. 

§175 

That  a  man  will  do  anything  for  the  woman  he 
loves. 

§176 

That  the  reason  William  Gillette,  who  has  been 
acting  for  over  forty  years,  always  smokes  cigars 
in  the  parts  he  plays  is  because  he  is  very  nervous 
when  on  the  stage. 

§177 

That  the  doughnut  is  an  exceptionally  indigest 
ible  article. 

§178 

That  one  captive  balloon  in  every  two  containing 
persons  on  pleasure  bent  breaks  away  fronS  its 
moorings,  and  drifts  out  to  sea. 

§179 

That  a  workingman  always  eats  what  is  in  his 
dinnerpail  with  great  relish. 
[136] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§180 

That  children  were  much  better  behaved  twenty 
years  ago  than  they  are  today. 

§181 

That  the  cashier  of  a  restaurant  in  adding  up  a 
customer's  cheque  always  adds  a  dollar  which  is 
subsequently  split  between  himself  and  the  waiter. 

§182 

That  it  is  impossible  to  pronounce  the  word 
"statistics"  without  stuttering. 

§183 

That  the  profession  of  white  slaving,  in  1900  con 
trolled  exclusively  by  Chinamen,  has  since  passed 
entirely  under  the  control  of  Italians. 

§184 

That  every  person  in  the  Riviera  lives  in  a 
"villa." 

§185 

That  the  chief  form  of  headgear  among  the  Swiss 
is  the  Alpine  hat. 

[137] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§186 

That  each  year  a  man  volunteers  to  take  his 
children  to  the  circus  merely  as  a  subterfuge  to  go 
himself. 

§187 
That  all  marriages  with  actresses  turn  out  badly. 

§188 

That  San  Francisco  is  a  very  gay  place,  and  full 
of  opium  joints. 

§189 

That  an  elevator  operator  never  succeeds  in  stop 
ping  his  car  on  a  level  with  the  floor. 

§190 

That  they  don't  make  any  pianos  today  as  good 
as  the  old  square  ones. 

§191 

That  a  man  who  habitually  clears  his  throat  be 
fore  he  speaks  is  generally  a  self-important  hypo 
crite  and  a  bluffer. 

[138] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§192 

That  Maurice  Maeterlinck,  the  Belgian  Dr. 
Frank  Crane,  leads  a  monastic  life. 

§193 

That  whenever  a  vaudeville  comedian  quotes  a 
familiar  commercial  slogan,  such  as  "His  Master's 
Voice,"  or  "Eventually,  why  not  now?",  he  is  paid 
$50  a  performance  for  doing  so. 

§194 

That  all  Asiatic  idols  have  large  precious  rubies 
in  their  foreheads. 

§195 

That  when  the  foe  beheld  Joan  of  Arc  leading  the 
French  army  against  them,  a  look  of  terror  froze 
their  features  and  that,  casting  their  arms  from 
them,  they  broke  into  a  frenzied  and  precipitate 
flight. 

§196 

That  the  late  King  Edward  VII  as  Prince  of 
Wales  easily  got  every  girl  he  wanted. 
[139] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§197 

That  the  penitentiaries  of  the  United  States  con 
tain  a  great  number  of  hapless  prisoners  pos 
sessed  of  a  genuine  gift  for  poetry. 

§198 

That  if  a  cat  gets  into  a  room  where  a  baby  is 
sleeping,  the  cat  will  suck  the  baby's  breath  and 
kill  it. 

§199 

That  all  men  named  Clarence,  Claude  or  Percy 
are  sissies. 

§200 

That  a  street  car  conductor  steals  every  fifth 
nickel. 

§201 

That  the  security  of  a  bank  is  to  be  estimated  in 
proportion  to  the  solidity  of  the  bank  building. 

§202 

That  seventy-five  per  cent  of  all  taxicab  drivers 
have  at  one  time  or  another  been  in  Sing  Sing. 
[140] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§203 

That  one  can  buy  a  fine  suit  of  clothes  in  London 
for  twelve  dollars. 

§204 

That  the  chicken  salad  served  in  restaurants  is 
always  made  of  veal. 

§205 

That  a  play  without  a  bed  in  it  never  makes  any 
money  in  Paris. 

§206 

That  Conan  Doyle  would  have  made  a  wonderful 
detective. 

§207 

That  an  oyster-shucker  every  month  or  so  dis 
covers  a  pearl  which  he  goes  out  and  sells  for  five 
hundred  dollars. 

§208 

That  a  napkin  is  always  wrapped  around  a  cham 
pagne  bottle  for  the  purpose  of  hiding  the  label,  and 
that  the  quality  of  the  champagne  may  be  judged 
by  the  amount  of  noise  the  cork  makes  when  it  is 
popped. 

[141] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§209 

That  because  a  married  woman  remains  loyal  to 
her  husband  she  loves  him. 

§210 

That  every  time  one  blows  oneself  to  a  particu 
larly  expensive  cigar  and  leans  back  to  enjoy  one 
self  with  a  good  smoke  after  a  hearty  and  satisfying 
dinner,  the  cigar  proceeds  to  burn  down  the  side. 

§211 

That  when  a  police  captain  goes  on  a  holiday  he 
always  gets  boilingly  drunk. 

§212 

That  an  Italian  puts  garlic  in  everything  he  eats, 
including  coffee. 

§213 

That  if  one  hits  a  negro  on  the  head  with  a  cob 
blestone,  the  cobblestone  will  break. 

§214 

That  all  nuns  have  entered  convents  because  of 
unfortunate  love  affairs. 

[142] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§215 

That,  being  surrounded  by  alcoholic  beverages 
and  believing  the  temptation  would  be  irresistible 
once  he  began,  a  bartender  in  the  old  days  never 
took  a  drink. 

§216 

That  all  millionaires  are  born  in  small  ram 
shackle  houses  situated  near  railroad  tracks. 

§217 

That  farmers  afford  particularly  easy  prey  for 
book-agents  and  are  the  largest  purchasers  of  cheap 
sets  of  Guy  de  Maupassant,  Rudyard  Kipling  and 
0.  Henry. 

§218 
That  George  Washington  never  told  a  lie. 

§219 
That  a  dark  cigar  is  always  a  strong  one. 

§220 

That  the  night  air  is  poisonous. 
[143] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§221 

That  a  hair  from  a  horse's  tail,  if  put  into  a  bot 
tle  of  water,  will  turn  into  a  snake. 

§222 
That  champagne  is  the  best  of  all  wines. 

§223 

That  it  snowed  every  Christmas  down  to  fifteen 
years  ago. 

§224 

That  if  a  young  woman  finds  a  piece  of  tea  leaf 
floating  around  the  top  of  her  tea  cup,  it  is  a  sign 
that  she  will  be  married  before  the  end  of  the  year. 

§225 

That  if,  after  one  lusty  blow,  a  girl's  birthday 
cake  reveals  nine  candies  still  burning,  it  is  a  sign 
that  it  will  be  nine  years  before  she  gets  married. 

§226 

That  if,  while  promenading,  a  girl  and  her  es 
cort  walk  on  either  side  of  a  water  hydrant  or 
other  obstruction  instead  of  both  walking  'round  it 
[144] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

on  the  same  side,  they  will  have  a  misunderstand 
ing  before  the  month  is  over. 

§227 

That  it  is  unlikely  that  a  man  and  woman  who 
enter  a  hotel  without  baggage  after  10  P.  M.  and 
register  are  man  and  wife. 

§228 

That  all  country  girls  have  clear,  fresh,  rosy 
complexions. 

§229 

That  chorus  girls  spend  the  time  during  the 
entr'-actes  sitting  around  naked  in  their  dressing- 
rooms  telling  naughty  stories. 

§230 

That  many  soldiers'  lives  have  been  saved  in  bat 
tle  by  bullets  lodging  in  Bibles  which  they  have 
carried  in  their  breast  pockets. 

§231 

That  each  year  the  Fourth  of  July  exodus  to  the 
bathing  beaches  on  the  part  of  persons  from  the 
city  establishes  a  new  record. 
[145] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§232 

That  women  with  red  hair  or  wide  nostrils  are 
possessed  of  especially  passionate  natures. 

§233 

That  three-fourths  of  the  inhabitants  of  Denver 
are  lungers  who  have  gone  there  for  the  mountain 
air. 

§234 

That,  when  sojourning  in  Italy,  one  always  feels 
very  lazy. 

§235 

That  the  people  of  Johnstown,  Pa.,  still  talk  of 
nothing  but  the  flood. 

§236 

That  there  is  no  finer  smell  in  the  world  than  that 
of  burning  autumn  leaves. 

§237 

That  Jules  Verne  anticipated  all  the  great  modern 
inventions. 

§238 

That  a  man  is  always  a  much  heartier  eater  than 
a  woman. 

[146] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§239 

That  all  the  girls  in  Mr.  Ziegfeld's  "Follies"  are 
extraordinarily  seductive,  and  that  at  least  40  head 
of  bank  cashiers  are  annually  guilty  of  tapping  the 
till  in  order  to  buy  them  diamonds  and  Russian 
sables. 

§240 

That  a  college  sophomore  is  always  a  complete 
ignoramus. 

§241 

That  rubbers  in  wet  weather  are  a  preventive  of 
colds. 

§242 

That  if  one  eats  oysters  in  a  month  not  contain 
ing  an  "r,"  one  is  certain  to  get  ptomaine  poisoning. 

§243 

That  a  woman  with  a  7%-C  foot  always  tries  to 
squeeze  it  into  a  4%-A  shoe. 

§244 

That  no  shop  girl  ever  reads  anything  but  Laura 
Jean  Libbey  and  the  cheap  sex  magazines. 
[147] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§245 

That  there  is  something  peculiar  about  a  man 
who  wears  a  red  tie. 

§246 

That  all  Bolsheviki  and  Anarchists  have 
whiskers. 

§247 

That  all  the  millionaires  of  Pittsburgh  are  very 
loud  fellows,  and  raise  merry  hell  with  the  chorus 
girls  every  time  they  go  to  New  York. 

§248 

That  a  man  of  fifty-five  is  always  more  expe 
rienced  than  a  man  of  thirty-five. 

§249 
That  new  Bermuda  potatoes  come  from  Bermuda. 

§250 

That  the  boy  who  regularly  stands  at  the  foot  of 
his  class  in  school  always  turns  out  in  later  life  to 
be  very  successful. 

[148] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§251 

That  the  ornamental  daggers  fashioned  out  of  one 
hundred  dollars'  worth  of  Chinese  coins  strung  to 
gether,  which  one  buys  in  Pekin  or  Hong  Kong 
for  three  dollars  and  a  quarter,  are  fashioned  out 
of  one  hundred  dollars'  worth  of  Chinese  coins. 

§252 

That  it  is  hard  to  find  any  one  in  Hoboken,  N.  J., 
who  can  speak  English. 

§253 

That  the  headwaiter  in  a  fashionable  restaurant 
has  better  manners  than  any  other  man  in  the 
place. 

§254 

That  a  girl  always  likes  best  the  man  who  is 
possessed  of  a  cavalier  politeness. 

§255 

That  the  most  comfortable  room  conceivable  is 
one  containing  a  great  big  open  fireplace. 
[149] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§256 

That  brunettes  are  more  likely  to  grow  stout  in 
later  years  than  blondes. 

§257 

That  a  sepia  photograph  of  the  Coliseum,  framed, 
is  a  work  of  art. 

§258 

That  every  time  one  crosses  the  English  Channel 
one  encounters  rough  weather  and  is  very  sea-sick. 

§259 

That  the  Navajo  blankets  sold  to  trans-continental 
tourists  by  the  Indians  on  the  station  platform  at 
Albuquerque,  New  Mexico,  are  made  by  the  Elite 
Novelty  M'f'g.  Co.  of  Passaic,  N.  J.,  and  are  bought 
by  the  Indians  in  lots  of  1,000. 

§260 

That  appendicitis  is  an  ailment  invented  by  sur 
geons  twelve  years  ago  for  money-making  purposes 
and  that,  in  the  century  before  that  time,  no  one 
was  ever  troubled  with  it. 

[150] 


THE    AMERICAN    CREDO 
§261 

That  a  theatrical  matinee  performance  is  always 
inferior  to  an  evening  performance,  the  star  being 
always  eager  to  hurry  up  the  show  in  order  to  get 
a  longer  period  for  rest  before  the  night  perform 
ance. 

§262 

That  John  D.  Rockefeller  would  give  his  whole 
fortune  for  a  digestion  good  enough  to  digest  a 
cruller. 

§263 

That  a  clergyman  leads  an  easy  and  lazy  life, 
and  spends  most  of  his  time  visiting  women  parish 
ioners  while  their  husbands  are  at  work. 

§264 

That  it  is  almost  sure  death  to  eat  cucumbers 
and  drink  milk  at  the  same  meal. 

§265 
That  all  bank  cashiers,  soon  or  late,  tap  the  till. 

§266 

That  the  members  of  fashionable  church  choirs, 
[151] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

during  the  sermon,  engage  in  kissing  and  hugging 
behind  the  pipe-organ. 

§267 

That  women  who  are  in  society  never  pay  any 
attention  to  their  children,  and  wish  that  they  would 
die. 

§268 

That  if  one  gets  one's  feet  wet,  one  is  sure  to 
catch  cold. 

§269 

That  all  French  women  are  very  passionate,  and 
will  sacrifice  everything  to  love. 

§270 

That  when  a  drunken  man  falls  he  never  hurts 
himself. 

§271 

That  all  Chinese  laundrymen  sprinkle  their 
laundry  by  taking  a  mouthful  of  water  and  squirt 
ing  it  out  at  their  wash  in  a  fine  spray;  and  that, 
whatever  the  cost  of  living  to  a  white  man,  the 
Chinese  laundryman  always  lives  on  eight  cents  a 
day. 

[152] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§272 

That  if  one  fixes  a  savage  beast  with  one's  eye, 
the  beast  will  remain  rooted  to  the  spot  and  pres 
ently  slink  away. 

§273 

That  if  one  eats  cucumbers  and  then  goes  in 
swimming,  one  will  be  seized  with  a  cramp. 

§274 

That  hiccoughs  may  be  stopped  by  counting 
slowly  up  to  one  hundred. 

§275      « 

That  newspaper  reporters  hear,  every  day,  a 
great  many  thumping  scandals  that  they  fail  to 
print,  and  that  they  refrain  through  considerations 
of  honour. 

§276 

That  the  young  East  Side  fellow  who  plays  vio 
lin  solos  at  the  moving-picture  theatre  around  the 
corner  is  so  talented  that,  if  he  had  the  money  to 
go  to  Europe  to  study,  he  would  be  a  rival  to 
Kreisler  within  three  years. 
[153] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§277 

That  Paderewski,  during  the  piano-playing  days, 
wore  a  wig,  and  was  actually  as  bald  as  a  coot. 

§278 

That  lightning  never  strikes  twice  in  the  same 
place. 

§279 

That  when  a  doctor  finds  there  is  nothing  the 
matter  with  a  man  who  has  come  to  consult  him, 
he  never  frankly  tells  the  man  there's  nothing 
wrong  with  him,  but  always  gives  him  bread  pills. 

§280 

That,  in  a  family  crisis,  the  son  always  sticks 
to  the  mother  and  the  daughter  to  the  father. 

§281 

That  beer  is  very  fattening. 
* 

§282 

That  no  man  of  first-rate  mental  attainments  ever 
goes  in  for  dancing. 

[154] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§283 
That  a  woman  can't  sharpen  a  lead  pencil. 

§284 

That  on  every  trans-Atlantic  steamer  there  are 
two  smooth  gamblers  who,  the  moment  the  ship 
docks,  sneak  over  the  side  with  the  large  sum  of 
money  they  have  won  from  the  passengers. 

§285 

That  if  one  gets  out  of. bed  on  the  left  side  in 
the  morning,  one  has  a  mean  disposition  for  the 
rest  of  the  day. 

§286 

That  a  woman  who  has  led  a  loose  life  is  so 
grateful  for  the  respect  shown  her  by  the  man  who 
asks  her  to  marry  him  that  she  makes  the  best  kind 
of  wife. 

§287 
That  fish  is  a  brain  food. 

§288 

That  street-corner  beggars  have  a  great  deal  of 
[155] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

money  hidden  away  at  home  under  the  kitchen 
floor. 

§289 

That  it  is  advisable  for  a  young  woman  who 
takes  gas  when  having  a  tooth  pulled  to  be  accom 
panied  by  some  one,  by  way  of  precaution  against 
the  dentist. 

§290 

That  all  girls  educated  in  convents  turn  out  in 
later  life  to  be  hell-raisers. 

§291 

That  a  young  girl  may  always  safely  be  trusted 
with  the  kind  of  man  who  speaks  of  his  mother. 

§292 

That  a  nine-year-old  boy  who  likes  to  play  with 
toy  steam  engines  is  probably  a  born  mechanical 
genius  and  should  be  educated  to  be  an  engineer. 

§  293 

That  all  celebrated  professional  humourists  are 
in  private  life  heavy  and  witless  fellows. 
[156] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§294 

That  when  one  stands  close  to  the  edge  of  a 
dizzy  altitude,  one  is  seized  peculiarly  with  an  im 
pulse  to  jump  off. 

§295 

That  if  one  eats  an  apple  every  night  before 
retiring,  one  will  never  be  ill. 

§296 

That  all  negroes  born  south  of  the  Potomac  can 
play  the  banjo  and  are  excellent  dancers. 

§297 

That  whenever  a  negro  is  educated  he  refuses  to 
work  and  becomes  a  criminal. 

§298 

That  whenever  an  Italian  begins  to  dress  like  an 
American  and  to  drive  a  Dodge  car,  it  is  a  sign 
he  has  taken  to  black-handing  or  has  acquired  an 
interest  in  the  white-slave  trust. 

§299 

That,  in  the  days  when  there  were  breweries,  the 
men  who  drove  beer-wagons  drank  65  glasses  of 
[157] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

beer  a  head  a  day,  and  that  it  didn't  hurt  them  be 
cause  it  came  direct  from  the  wood. 

§300 

That,  until  the  time  of  American  intervention, 
the  people  of  the  Philippines  were  all  cannibals, 
and  displayed  the  heads  of  their  fallen  enemies  on 
poles  in  front  of  their  houses. 

§301 

That  whenever  a  crowd  of  boys  goes  camping  in 
summer  two  or  three  of  them  are  drowned,  and  the 
rest  come  home  suffering  from  poison  ivy. 

§302 

That  whenever  a  will  case  gets  into  the  courts, 
the  lawyers  gobble  all  the  money,  and  the  heirs 
come  out  penniless. 

§303 

That  every  female  moving-picture  star  carries 
on  an  intrigue  with  her  leading  man,  and  will 
marry  him  as  soon  as  he  can  get  rid  of  his  poor 
first  wife,  who  took  in  washing  in  order  to  pay  for 
his  education  in  the  art  of  acting. 
[158] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§304 

That  all  theatrical  managers  are  Jews,  and  that 
most  of  them  can  scarcely  speak  English. 

§305 

That  a  great  many  of  women's  serious  diseases 
are  due  to  high  French  heels. 

§306 

That  if  one  does  not  scratch  a  mosquito  bite,  it 
will  stop  itching. 

§307 

That  when  a  girl  gives  a  man  a  pen-knife  for  a 
present,  their  friendship  will  come  to  an  unhappy 
end  unless  he  exercises  the  precaution  to  ward  off 
bad  luck  by  giving  her  a  penny. 

§308 

That  whenever  one  takes  an  umbrella  with  one, 
it  doesn't  rain. 

§309 

That  the  cloth  used  in  suits  made  in  England  is 
so  good  that  it  never  wears  out. 
[159] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§310 

That  cinnamon  drops  are  coloured  red  with  a 
dye-stuff  manufactured  out  of  the  dried  bodies  of 
cochineal  insects. 

§311 

That  the  missionaries  in  China  and  Africa  make 
fortunes  robbing  the  natives  they  are  sent  out  to 
convert. 

§312 

That  there  is  a  revolution  in  Central  America 
every  morning  before  breakfast,  and  that  the  sole 
object  of  all  the  revolutionary  chiefs  is  to  seize 
the  money  in  the  public  treasury  and  make  off  to 
Paris. 

§313 

That  whenever  there  is  a  funeral  in  an  Irish 
family  the  mourners  all  get  drunk  and  proceed  to 
assault  one  another  with  clubs. 

§314 

That  all  immigrants  come  to  America  in  search 
of  liberty,  and  that  when  they  attempt  to  exercise 
it  they  should  be  immediately  sent  back. 
[160] 


THE    AMERICAN    CREDO 

§315 

That  whenever  a  rich  American  girl  marries  a 
foreign  nobleman,  he  at  once  gets  hold  of  all  her 
money,  then  beats  her  and  then  runs  away  with  an 
actress. 

§316 

That  if  one  begins  eating  peanuts  one  cannot 
stop. 

§317 

That  a  bachelor  never  has  any  one  to  sew  the 
buttons  on  his  clothes. 

§318 

That  whenever  a  dog  wags  his  tail  it  is  a  sign 
that  he  is  particularly  happy. 

§319 

That  an  Italian  street  labourer  can  do  a  hard 
day's  work  on  one  large  plate  of  spaghetti  a  day. 

§320 

That  if  one  breaks  a  mirror  one  will  have  bad 
luck  for  seven  years. 

[161] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§321 

That  two  men  seldom  agree  that  the  same  girl  is 
good-looking. 

§322 

That  in  the  infinitesimal  space  of  time  between 
the  springing  of  the  trap-door  and  his  dropping 
through  it,  a  hanged  man  sees  his  entire  life  pass 
in  panorama  before  him. 

§323 

That  when  Washington  crossed  the  Delaware,  he 
stood  up  in  the  bow  of  the  boat  holding  aloft  a 
large  American  flag. 

§324 

That  whereas  a  man  always  hopes  his  first  child 
will  be  a  boy,  his  wife  always  hopes  that  it  will  be 
a  girl. 

§325 

That  the  first  time  a  boy  smokes  a  cigar  he  al 
ways  becomes  deathly  sick. 

§326 

That  a  woman  always  makes  a  practice  of  being 
[162] 


THE    AMERICAN    CREDO 

deliberately  late  in  keeping  an  appointment  with 
a  man. 

§327 

That  if,  encountering  a  savage  beast  in  the  jun 
gle,  one  falls  upon  the  ground,  lies  still  and  pre 
tends  that  one  is  dead,  the  savage  beast  will 
promptly  make  off  and  not  hurt  one. 

§328 

That  if  one  sits  in  front  of  the  Cafe  de  la  Paix, 
in  Paris,  one  will  soon  or  late  see  everybody  in 
the  world  that  one  knows. 

§329 

That  it  is  always  twice  as  hard  to  get  rid  of  a 
summer  cold  as  to  get  rid  of  a  winter  cold. 

§330 

That  a  soft  speaking  voice  is  the  invariable  mark 
of  a  well-bred  man. 

§331 

That  the  persons  who  most  vociferously  applaud 
the  playing  of  "Dixie"  in  restaurants  are  all  North- 
[163] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

erners  who  have  never  been  further  South  than 
Allentown,  Pa. 

§332 

That  the  larger  the  dog,  the  safer  he  is  for  chil 
dren. 

§333 

That  Catholic  priests  never  solicit  money  from 
their  parishioners,  but  merely  assess  them  so  much 
a  head,  and  make  them  pay  up  instantly. 

§334 

That  nine  times  in  ten  when  one  is  in  pain,  and 
a  doctor  assures  one  that  he  is  squirting  morphine 
into  one's  arm,  what  he  is  really  squirting  in  is 
only  warm  water. 

§335 

That  a  German  civilian,  before  the  war,  had  to 
get  off  the  sidewalk  whenever  an  army  lieutenant 
approached  him  on  the  street,  and  that,  if  he  failed 
to  do  so  instantly,  the  lieutenant  was  free  to  run 
him  through  with  his  sword. 

§336 

That  while  it  may  be  possible,  in  every  indi- 
[164] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

vidual  case  of  spiritualist  communication  with  the 
dead,  to  prove  fraud  by  the  medium,  the  accumu 
lated  effect  of  such  communications  is  to  demon 
strate  the  immortality  of  the  soul. 

§337 

That  an  Italian  who  earns  and  saves  $1,000  in 
America  can  take  the  money  home,  invest  it  in  an 
estate,  and  live  like  a  rich  man  thereafter. 

§338 

That  all  Mormons,  despite  the  laws  against  it, 
still  practise  polygamy,  and  that  they  have  agents 
all  over  the  world  recruiting  cuties  for  their 
harems. 

§339 

That  when  a  man  goes  to  a  photographer's  to 
have  his  picture  taken,  the  knowledge  that  he  is 
having  his  picture  taken  always  makes  him  very 
self-conscious,  thus  causing  him  to  assume  an  ex 
pression  which  results  in  the  photograph  being  an 
inaccurate  likeness. 

§340 

That  if  the  lower  line  on  the  palm  of  one's  hand 
[165] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

is  a  long  one,  it  is  a  sign  that  one  is  going  to  live  to 
a  ripe  old  age. 

§341 

That  Italian  counts,  before  the  war,  always  used 
to  make  their  expenses  when  they  came  to  America 
by  acting  as  wine  agents. 

§342 

That  a  Russian  peasant,  in  the  days  of  the  czar, 
drank  two  quarts  of  vodka  a  day. 

§343 

That  a  German  farmer  can  raise  more  produce 
on  one  acre  of  land  than  an  American  can  raise 
on  a  hundred. 

§344 

That  a  boil  on  the  neck  purifies  the  blood  and  is 
worth  $1,000. 

§345 

That  whenever  a  Frenchman  comes  home  unex 
pectedly,  some  friend  of  the  family  makes  a  quick 
sneak  out  of  the  back  door. 
[166] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§346 

That  every  negro  servant  girl  spends  at  least 
half  of  her  wages  on  preparations  for  taking  the 
kink  out  of  her  hair. 

§347 

That  the  licorice  candy  sold  in  cheap  candy 
stores  is  made  of  old  rubber  boots. 

§348 

That  if  a  boy  is  given  all  he  wants  to  drink  at 
home  he  will  not  drink  when  he  is  away  from  home. 

§349 

That  the  second-class  passengers  on  a  trans-At 
lantic  steamship  always  have  more  fun  than  the 
first-class  passengers. 

§350 

That  a  drunken  man  always  pronounces  every 
"s"  as  "ah." 

§351 

That  champagne  will  prevent  seasickness. 
[167] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§352 

That  thin  wrists  and  slender  ankles  are  unmis 
takable  signs  of  aristocratic  breeding. 

§353 

That  when  one  asks  a  girl  to  go  canoeing  she  al 
ways  brings  along  a  bright  red  or  yellow  sofa 
cushion. 

§354 

That  when  a  woman  buys  cigars  for  a  man  she 
always  judges  the  quality  of  the  cigars  by  the  mag 
nificence  of  the  cigar-bands. 

§355 

That  candle  light  makes  a  woman  forty-five  years 
old  look  fifteen  years  younger. 

§356 

That  the  winters  in  the  United  States  are  a  good 
deal  less  cold  than  they  used  to  be,  and  that  the 
change  has  been  caused  by  the  Gulf  Stream. 

§357 

That  the  Thursday  matinees  given  by  Chauncey 
Olcott  are  attended  only  by  Irish  servant  girls. 
[168] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§358 

That  the  reason  the  British  authorities  didn't 
lock  up  Bernard  Shaw  during  the  war  was  because 
they  were  afraid  of  his  mind. 

§359 

That  Professor  Garner  is  able  to  carry  on  long 
and  intimate  conversations  with  monkeys  in  their 
own  language. 

§360 
That  oysters  are  a  great  aphrodisiac. 

§361 

That  if  one  sleeps  with  one's  head  on  a  high 
pillow  one  will  be  round-shouldered. 

§362 

That  coal  miners  get  so  dirty  that  they  have  to 
wash  so  often  that  they  are  the  cleanest  working- 
men  in  the  world. 

§363 

That  the  average  French  housewife  can  make 
such  a  soup  out  of  the  contents  of  a  garbage-can 
that  the  eater  will  think  he  is  at  the  Ritz. 
[169] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§364 

That  such  authors  as  Dr.  Frank  Crane  and  Her 
bert  Kaufman  do  not  really  believe  what  they 
write,  but  print  it  simply  for  the  money  that  is  in  it. 

§365 

That  the  average  newspaper  cartoonist  makes 
$100,000  a  year. 

§366 

That  when  a  play  is  given  in  an  insane  asylum 
the  inmates  always  laugh  at  the  tragic  moments 
and  cry  at  the  humorous  moments. 

§367 

That  if  a  girl  takes  the  last  cake  off  a  plate  she 
will  die  an  old  maid. 

§368 

That  men  high  in  public  affairs  always  read 
detective  stories  for  diversion. 

§369 

That  the  wireless  news  bulletins  posted  daily  on 
ocean  liners  are  made  up  on  board. 
[170] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§370 
That  the  Swiss,  when  they  sing,  always  yodel. 

§371 
That  all  German  housewives  are  very  frugal. 

§372 

That  if  one  holds  a  buttercup  under  a  person's 
chin  and  a  yellow  light  is  reflected  upon  that  per 
son's  chin,  it  is  a  sign  that  he  likes  butter. 

§373 

That  all  penny-in-the-slot  weighing  machines 
make  a  fat  woman  lighter  and  a  thin  woman 
heavier. 

§374 

That  in  the  period  just  before  a  woman's  baby 
is  born  the  woman's  face  takes  on  a  peculiar  spir 
itual  and  holy  look. 

§375 

That  when  a  Chinese  laundryman  hands  one  a 
slip  for  one's  laundry,  the  Chinese  letters  which 
he  writes  on  the  slip  have  nothing  to  do  with  the 
[171] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

laundry  but  are  in  reality  a  derogatory  descrip 
tion  of  the  owner. 

§376 

That  an  old  woman  with  rheumatism  in  her  leg 
can  infallibly  predict  when  it  is  going  to  rain. 

§377 
That  Philadelphia  is  a  very  sleepy  town. 

§3~78 

That  it  is  impossible  for  a  man  to  learn  how  to 
thread  a  needle. 

§379 

That  there  is  something  unmanly  about  a  grown 
man  playing  the  piano,  save  only  when  he  plays  it 
in  a  bordello. 

§380 

That  a  couple  of  quinine  pills,  with  a  chaser  of 
rye  whiskey,  will  cure  a  cold. 

§381 

That  all  Congressmen  who  voted  for  Prohibition 
are  secret  lushers  and  have  heavy  stocks  of  all 
sorts  of  liquors  in  their  cellars. 
[172] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§382 

That  a  certain  Exalted  Personage  in  Washing 
ton  is  a  gay  dog  with  the  ladies  and  used  to  cut 
up  with  a  stock  company  actress. 

§383 
That  all  the  best  cooks  are  men. 

§384 

That  all  Japanese  butlers  are  lieutenants  in  the 
Japanese  Navy  and  that  they  read  and  copy  all 
letters  received  by  the  folks  they  work  for. 

§385 

That  the  best  way  to  stop  nose-bleed  is  to  drop  a 
door-key  down  the  patient's  back. 

§386 

That  a  thunder-storm  will  cause  milk  to  turn 
sour. 

§387 

That  if  a  man  drinks  three  glasses  of  buttermilk 
every  day  he  will  never  be  ill. 
[173] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§388 

That  whenever  two  Indians  meet  they  greet  each 
other  with  the  word  "How!" 

§389 

That  the  Justices  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  the 
United  States  all  chew  tobacco  while  hearing  cases, 
but  that  they  are  very  serious  men  otherwise,  and 
never  laugh,  or  look  at  a  pretty  girl,  or  get  tight. 

§390 

That  all  negro  prize-fighters  marry  white  women, 
and  that  they  afterward  beat  them. 

§391 

That  New  Orleans  is  a  very  gay  town  and  full  of 
beautiful  French  Creoles. 

§392 
That  gin  is  good  for  the  kidneys. 

§393 

That  the  English  lower  classes  are  so  servile  that 
they  say  "Thank  you,  sir,"  if  one  kicks  them  in  the 
pantaloons. 

[174] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§394 

That  the  gipsies  who  go  about  the  country  are 
all  horse-thieves,  and  that  they  will  put  a  spell  upon 
the  cattle  of  any  farmer  who  has  them  arrested  for 
stealing  his  mare. 

§395 

That  every  bachelor  of  easy  means  has  an  illicit 
affair  with  a  grass  widow  in  a  near-by  city  and  is 
the  father  of  several  illegitimate  children. 

§396 

That  a  country  editor  receives  so  many  presents 
of  potatoes,  corn,  rutabagas,  asparagus,  country 
ham,  carrots,  turnips,  etc.,  that  he  never  has  to 
buy  any  food. 

§397 

That  whenever  news  reached  him  of  another  Fed 
eral  disaster  Abraham  Lincoln  would  laugh  it  off 
with  a  very  funny  and  often  somewhat  smutty 
story,  made  up  on  the  spot. 

§398 

That  George  Washington  died  of  a  heavy  cold 
brought  on  by  swimming  the  Potomac  in  the  heart 
[175] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

of  winter  to  visit  a  yellow  girl  on  the  Maryland 
shore. 

§399 

That  all  negroes  who  show  any  intelligence  what 
ever  are  actually  two-thirds  white,  and  the  sons  of 
United  States  Senators. 

§400 

That  the  late  King  Leopold  of  Belgium  left  350 
illegitimate  children. 

§401 

That  Senator  Henry  Cabot  Lodge  is  a  very  brainy 
man,  though  somewhat  stuck  up. 

§402 

That  if  one  eats  ice-cream  after  lobster  one  will 
be  doubled  up  by  belly-ache. 

§403 

That  Quakers,  for  all  their  religion,  are  always 
very  sharp  traders  and  have  a  great  deal  of  money 
hidden  away  in  banks. 

[176] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§404 

That  old  baseball  players  always  take  to  booze, 
and  so  end  their  days  either  as  panhandlers,  as 
night  watchmen  or  as  janitors  of  Odd  Fellows' 
halls. 

§405 

That  the  object  of  the  players,  in  college  foot 
ball,  is  to  gouge  out  one  another's  eyes  and  pull 
off  one  another's  ears. 

§406 

That  the  sort  of  woman  who  carries  around  a 
Pomeranian  dog,  if  she  should  ever  have  a  child 
inadvertently,  would  give  the  midwife  $500  to 
make  away  with  it. 

§407 

That  a  woman  likes  to  go  to  a  bargain  sale,  fight 
her  way  to  the  counter,  and  have  pins  stuck  into 
her  and  her  feet  mashed  by  other  women. 

§408 

That,  if  one  swallows  an  ounce  of  olive  oil  be 
fore  going  to  a  banquet,  one  will  not  get  drunk. 
[177] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§409 

That  a  mud-turtle  is  so  tenacious  of  life  that  if 
one  cuts  off  his  head  a  new  one  will  grow  in  its 
place. 

§410 

That  the  only  things  farmers  read  are  govern 
ment  documents  and  patent-medicine  almanacs. 

§411 

That  if  one's  ear  itches  it  is  a  sign  that  some  one 
is  talking  of  one. 

§412 

That  Italian  children,  immediately  they  leave  the 
cradle,  are  sewed  into  their  underclothes,  and  that 
they  never  get  a  bath  thereafter  until  they  are  con 
firmed. 

§413 

That  all  Catholic  priests  are  very  hearty  eaters, 
and  have  good  wine  cellars. 

§414 

That  politics  in  America  would  be  improved  by 
turning  all  the  public  offices  over  to  business  men. 
[178] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§415 

That  department  store  sales  are  always  fakes, 
and  that  they  mark  down  a  few  things  to  attract 
the  women  and  then  swindle  them  by  lifting  the 
prices  on  things  they  actually  want. 

§416 

That  100,000  abortions  are  performed  in  Chi 
cago  every  year. 

§417 

That  John  D.  Rockefeller  has  a  great  mind,  and 
would  make  a  fine  President  if  it  were  not  for  his 
craze  for  money. 

§418 

That  all  the  Jews  who  were  drafted  during  the 
late  war  were  put  into  the  Quartermaster's  Depart 
ment  on  account  of  their  extraordinary  business 
acumen. 

§419 

That  a  jury  never  convicts  a  pretty  woman. 

§420 

That  chorus  girls  in  the  old  days  got  so  tired  of 
[179] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

drinking  champagne  that  the  sound  of  a  cork  pop 
ping  made  them  shudder. 

§421 

That  the  Massachusetts  troops,  after  the  first  bat 
tle  of  Bull  Run,  didn't  stop  running  until  they 
reached  Harrisburg,  Pa. 

§422 

That  General  Grant  was  always  soused  during  a 
battle,  and  that  on  the  few  occasions  when  he  was 
sober  he  got  licked. 

§423 

That  the  late  King  Edward  used  to  carry  on  in 
Paris  at  such  a  gait  that  he  shocked  even  the 
Parisians. 

§424 

That  it  takes  an  Englishman  two  days  to  see  a 
joke,  and  that  he  always  gets  it  backward  even  then. 

§425 

That  headwaiters  in  fashionable  hotels  make 
$100  a  day. 

[180] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§426 

That  if  a  bat  flies  into  a  woman's  hair,  the  hair 
must  be  cut  off  to  get  it  out. 

§427 

That  all  the  women  in  Chicago  have  very  large 
feet. 

§428 

That  on  cold  nights  policemen  always  sneak  into 
stables  on  their  beats  and  go  to  sleep. 

§429 

That  all  the  schoolboys  in  Boston  have  bulged 
brows,  wear  large  spectacles  and  can  read  Greek. 

§430 
That  all  dachshunds  come  from  Germany. 

§431 

That  nine  out  of  every  ten  Frenchmen  have 
syphilis. 

§432 

That  the  frankfurters  sold  at  circuses  and  pleas 
ure  parks  are  made  of  dog  meat. 
[181] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§433 

That  all  the  cheaper  brands  of  cigarettes  are 
sophisticated  with  drugs,  and  in  time  cause  those 
who  smoke  them  to  get  softening  of  the  brain. 

§434 
That  rock-and-rye  will  cure  a  cold. 

§435 

That  a  country  boy  armed  with  a  bent  pin  can 
catch  more  fish  than  a  city  angler  with  the  latest 
and  most  expensive  tackle. 

§436 
That  red-haired  girls  are  especially  virulent. 

§437 
That  all  gamblers  eventually  go  broke. 

§438 

That  the  worst  actress  in  the  company  is  always 
the  manager's  wife. 

§439 

That  an  elephant  in  a  circus  never  forgets  a  per- 
[182] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

son  who  gives  him  a  chew  of  tobacco  or  a  rotten  pea 
nut,  but  will  single  him  out  from  a  crowd  years 
afterward  and  bash  in  his  head  with  one  colossal 
blow. 

§440 
That  it  is  unlucky  to  put  your  hat  on  a  bed. 

§441 

That  an  old  sock  makes  the  best  wrapping  for  a 
sore  throat. 

§442 

That  lighting  three  cigarettes  with  one  match  will 
bring  some  terrible  calamity  upon  one  or  other  of 
the  three  smokers. 

§443 

That  milking  a  cow  is  an  operation  demanding  a 
special  talent  that  is  possessed  only  by  yokels,  and 
that  a  person  born  in  a  large  city  can  never  hope 
to  acquire  it. 

§444 

That  whenever  there  is  a  rough-house  during  a 
strike,  it  is  caused  by  foreign  anarchists  who  are 
trying  to  knock  out  American  idealism. 
[183] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§445 

That,  whatever  the  demerits  of  Jews  otherwise, 
they  are  always  very  kind  to  their  old  parents. 

§446 

That  the  Swiss  army,  though  small,  is  so  strong 
that  not  even  the  German  army  in  its  palmy  days 
could  have  invaded  Switzerland,  and  that  it  is  strong 
because  all  Swiss  are  patriots  to  the  death. 

§447 

That  when  two  Frenchmen  fight  a  duel,  whether 
with  pistols  or  with  swords,  neither  of  them  is  ever 
hurt  half  so  much  as  he  would  have  been  had  he 
fought  an  honest  American  wearing  boxing-gloves. 

§448 

That  whenever  Prohibition  is  enforced  in  a  re 
gion  populated  by  negroes,  they  take  to  morphine, 
heroin  and  other  powerful  drugs,  and  begin  mur 
dering  all  of  the  white  inhabitants. 

§449 

That  all  the  great  writers  of  the  world  now  use 
typewriters. 

[184] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§450 

That  all  Presidents  of  the  United  'States  get 
many  hot  tips  on  the  stock-market,  but  that  they 
are  too  honourable  to  play  them,  and  so  turn  them 
over  to  their  wives,  who  make  fortunes  out  of  them. 

§451 

That  Elihu  Root  is  an  intellectual  giant,  and  that 
it  is  a  pity  the  suspicion  of  him  among  farmers 
makes  it  impossible  to  elect  him  President. 

§452 

That  no  man  not  a  sissy  can  ever  learn  to  thread 
a  needle  or  darn  a  sock. 

§453 

That  all  glass  blowers  soon  or  late  die  of  con 
sumption. 

§454 

That  all  women  who  go  in  bathing  at  the  French 
seaside  resorts  affect  very  naughty  one-piece  bath 
ing  suits. 

§455 

That  George  M.  Cohan  and  Irving  Berlin  can 
only  play  the  piano  with  one  finger. 
[185] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§456 

That  farmers  always  go  into  gold  mine  swindles 
because  of  the  magnificently  embossed  stock  cer 
tificates. 

§457 

That  the  Germans  eat  six  regular  meals  a  day, 
and  between  times  stave  off  their  appetite  with 
numerous  Schweitzer  cheese  sandwiches,  blutwurst 
and  beer. 

§458 

That  David  Belasco  teaches  his  actresses  how  to 
express  emotion  by  knocking  them  down  and  pull 
ing  them  around  the  stage  by  the  hair. 

§459 

That  only  Americans  travel  in  the  first  class  car 
riages  of  foreign  railway  trains,  and  that  fashion 
able  Englishmen  always  travel  third  class. 

§460 

That  the  whiskey  sold  in  blind  pigs  contains 
wood  alcohol  and  causes  those  who  drink  it  to  go 
blind. 

[186] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 
§461 

That  wealthy  society  women  never  wear  their 
pearl  necklaces  in  public,  but  always  keep  them  at 
home  in  safes  and  wear  indistinguishable  imita 
tions  instead. 

§462 

That  the  late  Charles  Yerkes  had  no  less 
than  twenty  girls,  for  each  of  whom  he  provided  a 
Fifth  Avenue  mansion  and  a  yearly  income  of 
$50,000. 

§463 

That  when  one  goes  to  a  railroad  station  to  meet 
some  one,  the  train  is  never  on  time. 

§464 

That  the  theatregoers  in  the  Scandinavian 
countries  care  for  nothing  but  Ibsen  and  Strind- 
berg. 

§465 

That  all  doctors  write  prescriptions  illegibly. 
[187] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§466 
That  Englishwomen  are  very  cold. 

§467 

That  when  the  weather  man  predicts  rain  it  al 
ways  turns  out  fair,  and  that  when  he  predicts  fair 
it  always  rains. 

§468 
That  lemon  juice  will  remove  freckles. 

§469 

That  if  a  woman  wears  a  string  of  amber  beads 
she  will  never  get  a  sore  throat. 

§470 
That  no  well-bred  person  ever  chews  gum. 

§471 

That  all  actors  sleep  till  noon,  and  spend  the 
afternoon  calling  on  women. 

§472 

That  the  men  who  make  sauerkraut  press  it  into 
barrels  by  jumping  on  it  with  their  bare  feet. 
[188] 


THE   AMERICAN   CREDO 

§473 

That  the  moment  a  nigger  gets  eight  dollars,  he 
goes  to  a  dentist  and  has  one  of  his  front  teeth  filled 
with  gold. 

§474 

That  one  never  sees  a  Frenchman  drunk,  all  the 
souses  whom  one  sees  in  Paris  being  Americans. 

§475 

That  a  daughter  is  always  a  much  greater  com 
fort  to  a  mother  in  after  life  than  a  son. 

§476 

That  a  man  with  a  weak,  receding  chin  is  always 
a  nincompoop. 

§477 

That  English  butlers  always  look  down  on  their 
American  employers,  and  frequently  have  to  leave 
the  room  to  keep  from  laughing  out  loud. 

§478 

That  the  most  faithful  and  loving  of  all  dogs  is 
the  Newfoundland. 

[189] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 

§479 

That  a  man  always  dislikes  his  mother-in-law, 
and  goes  half -crazy  every  time  she  visits  him. 

§480 

^S  U>  *• 

That  if  one  doesn't  scratch  a  mosquito  bite  it 

will  stop  itching. 

§481 

That  all  the  men  in  the  moving  picture  business 
were  formerly  cloak  and  suit  merchants,  and  that 
they  are  now  all  millionaires. 

§482 

That  the  accumulation  of  money  makes  a  man 
hard,  and  robs  him  of  ajl  his  finer  qualities. 

§483 

That,  in  an  elevator,  it  is  always  a  man  who 
usurps  the  looking-glass. 

§484 

That  it  is  very  unlucky  to  wear  an  opal. 
[190] 


THE   AMERICAN    CREDO 
§485 

That  if  a  man's  eyebrows  meet,  it  is  a  sign  that 
he  has  a  very  unpleasant  nature. 

§486 

That  a  negro  ball  always  ends  up  in  a  grand 
free-for-all  fight,  in  which  several  coons  are  mor 
tally  slashed  with  razors. 

§487 

That  if  Houdini  were  locked  up  in  Sing  Sing, 
he  would  manage  to  make  his  get-away  in  less  than 
half  an  hour's  time. 

§488 
That  Bob  Ingersoll  is  in  hell. 


THE   END 


[191] 


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